Adventures in Rhetoric

17th September 2009

The Minister for Justice is one of the most skilled communicators in the Oireachtas, but his statements [on Monday, 14th Sept] in relation to the quality of accommodation provided within the Irish Prison estate represent quite a remarkable adventure in the use of language. On opening a new accommodation block in Castlerea prison, the Minister announced the provision of 550 new prison spaces by the end of the year. The Minister then stated that when the prison development programme was completed, the Irish prison system would be “comparable to best international practice in terms of accommodation and services for prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration. This will put the Irish prison service in good stead for the 21st century.”

Leaving aside the widespread scepticism about plans to create 550 new prison spaces from within the existing prisons, it beggars belief that an Irish Government Minister can speak of 21st century prison conditions or best international practice when the majority of our prison accommodation is in most key respects worse than it was at the end of the 19th century.

In the current economic context, the Minister’s official position that Thornton Hall and Kilworth will go ahead at the original planned scale raises further questions. Given the clear need to sacrifice some major capital projects over the coming years, does anyone really believe that it is politically feasible or appropriate to build prisons of unprecedented size at a time when schools, hospitals and railway construction is under threat? Particularly when it is not at all clear that building on this scale will help to solve the problem beyond short-term relief. 

The Minister has consistently pointed out that 1,400 additional prison spaces have been built under Fianna Fáil governments over the past 15 years. Clearly, if there has been such a huge expansion in the number of prison spaces and overcrowding has in fact worsened the logical conclusion is that prison building cannot solve overcrowding. The provision of a number of building extensions to existing prisons may help to alleviate pressure in the system in the short term, but in the long-term we need to look at the sources of the problem - many of which the Minister could easily address without resorting to the tried and failed approach of prison expansion.

At all levels of the system, there are concrete steps that could be taken to reduce the numbers of prisoners, freeing up resources to make our prisons humane and more effective:

• The prison population could immediately be reduced to manageable levels and overcrowding solved if we as a society carried out a thorough analysis of our current practices in relation to immigration detainees, women offenders, fine defaulters, and traffic offences.
• We need to analyse whether the presumptive 10 year sentence for drug offences is really impacting on organised crime or if it is filling our prisons with low-level actors in the drug trade.
• There is a growing body of evidence that investment in crime prevention strategies and investment in supporting communities at risk of crime is a cheaper and more effective way of reducing offending.

The Minister is right that we should aspire to 21st century prison conditions, but the way to achieve that goal to aim to have smaller better prisons not by building more and larger versions of existing institutions. In the real world of our prison system, bringing conditions into the 20th century should be the immediate aim. A good place to start would be to hear a concrete plan from the Minister to end slopping-out and multi-prisoner occupation of cells in Mountjoy and Cork.

If humane prison conditions really is the goal, surely it is better to address the worst features of the existing estate as a matter of urgency before building new units?