There is a lack of vision in our approach to prisons and a disregard for public finances , writes Ian O'Donnell.
The publication of the annual report of the Irish Prison Service for 2003 provides a startling reminder of the cost of our infatuation with locking people up.
In 2003 there were 46 per cent more prisoners and 36 per cent more prison officers than there had been a decade earlier.
The expansion in the number of staff, coupled with high levels of overtime working, made custody in Ireland - at an annual average of €87,950 for each prisoner - possibly the most expensive in the world.
There is a staff member for every prisoner in Ireland. This generous ratio has never been justified and is way out of line with other countries. The average across the Council of Europe is three prisoners for every member of custodial staff.
It is crucial to remember that the rapid rise in prisoner numbers began in the mid-1990s after the rate of recorded crime had begun to fall.
This contradictory trend was due to a combination of factors including the raising of the political temperature in the wake of the killings of Jerry McCabe and Veronica Guerin; a build-up in the number of long-sentence prisoners; an expansion of the remand population after the bail referendum; and a reduction in the use of temporary release to ease overcrowding.
In addition to revealing the staggering expense of incarceration, the report raises three issues of particular concern. These are the rapid change in the racial composition of our prisons, the amount of money spent on prescribed medication and the overall coherence of penal policy.
One factor which accounts for rising prison populations across Europe is the jailing of non-nationals. It is inevitable that the prison population will change as members of minority groups begin to appear before the courts on criminal charges.
However, prison accommodation in Ireland is also being used to hold growing numbers of deportees. One quarter of all committals to prison during 2003 - more than 2,500 people - involved non-nationals, drawn from 115 different countries.
Most were detained for relatively short periods under the immigration laws, but one in five spent more than seven weeks behind bars.
Immigration cases aside, the sudden change in the make-up of prison committals may also reflect targeting by the police or differential patterns of offending or sentencing. Given the potential for perceptions of racial bias to bring criminal justice systems into disrepute, this is an area that would benefit from careful examination.
The average annual cost of each prisoner for pharmaceutical products last year was €820.
This ranged from €240 for the young men in St Patrick's Institution to over €2,000 for the women in Mountjoy.
The Prison Service describes this as "considerably higher" than the corresponding figure from prison services in other countries and "significantly higher" than for a similar population in the community.
A large chunk of this expenditure was on anti-depressants, sedatives and drugs used in the treatment of addiction.
This raises important questions about prisoner morbidity and the quality of prison regimes.
From the limited data available, it would appear that more people are sent to prison each year in Ireland than are given probation or community service. This is at odds with the accepted policy that imprisonment should be a sanction of last resort, used to the minimum extent compatible with retribution and public protection.
Almost 20 years ago, the Whitaker committee recommended: "As a guide to policy, a limit should be set from time to time to the acceptable prison population and any tendency for the limit to be exceeded should signal the need for revised policies and strategies."
This wise recommendation has had little practical effect.
Most of those sent to prison receive short sentences. In 2003, almost four in 10 had been sentenced to less than three months.
With remission this means a maximum of nine weeks served; surely too short for rehabilitative programmes to have any effect, but enough time to cause serious distress and disruption.
These short-sentence prisoners are minor, if sometimes persistent, offenders who could be managed effectively, and at a fraction of the cost, under some form of community supervision. That they are not illustrates the poverty of imagination which tends to characterise our approach to punishment.
When innovation is present it does not always endure. For example, a new prison for women opened in 1999 after years of debate and a capital investment of €13 million. It was a radical departure in prison architecture, comprising discrete houses rather than traditional cell blocks.
Its red-brick exterior gave no indication of its purpose and the quality of overall design, furniture and fittings was excellent.
It occupied a site within walking distance of Dublin's city centre, making it easy for many inmates to maintain family ties. In anticipation of a new era of prison life, it was named the Dóchas Centre.
It now seems likely that it will be razed along with the rest of the Mountjoy complex so that the site can be sold to developers.
That such a move is being considered underscores the lack of vision at the heart of penal policy-making, to say nothing of a healthy disregard for the public finances.
* Dr Ian O'Donnell is deputy director of the Institute of Criminology at the Law Faculty, UCD.