4th September 2024
On 4 September 2024, Irish Times journalist Shauna Bowers wrote a piece on mental health and addiction and the trend amongst women in the criminal justice system. Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) Executive Director, Saoirse Brady, contributed to the piece alongside some powerful accounts of women with direct experience, Niamh O’Carroll, a probation officer on the Dublin homeless team and Dr Sharon Lambert, senior lecturer of applied psychology in University College Cork (UCC). The positive support that The Saol Project provides to women leaving prison is mentioned in the piece.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
"There is a distinct trend among women in the criminal justice system, according to those who work in the sector. Many have experienced violence, whether it be by their parents or former partners; many have experienced addiction; and many are from socially deprived backgrounds.
Saoirse Brady, chief executive of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), says though this is not applicable for every woman in the criminal justice system, many “have been a victim of crime themselves in some way, usually domestic abuse, sexual abuse, some sort of violence, maybe psychological abuse”.
“I have spoken to women themselves who have talked about that, and they are often self-medicating. Maybe they have a mental health issue, a substance misuse issue, but they often have a mental health or trauma issue they haven’t really dealt with,” she says.
“When you think about women going into prison, very often they are mothers. This is a whole other piece. For women who have been separated from their children ... they are dealing with a myriad of things, you know the past trauma they have experienced.”
The most recent annual reports, 2022, from both the Irish Prison Service (IPS) and the probation service showed there were more women in the criminal justice net overall. Ms Brady says this is a “global trend”.
However, many of these women are facing custodial sentences for lesser offences and are serving short sentences.
According to the IPS annual report, women made up just under 11 per cent (509) of the sentenced committals to prison that year. Of those, 190 of the women’s committals were for theft and related offences. The majority were sentenced to short periods in prison.
Representative organisations have raised concerns about this, pointing to research finding that spending time in jail or prison increases a person’s risk of engaging in crime in the future.
The overcrowding in Irish prisons should be reason to reduce the reliance on custodial sentences, Brady says.
Last Thursday 122 per cent of bed capacity was used in the Dóchas women’s prison at Mountjoy, while 141 per cent was used in the women’s prison in Limerick.
“We need to stop sending people to prison for very short periods of time and instead invest in some of those other pieces like probation, community service or diversion programmes,” she says."
Respect for rights in the penal system with prison as a last resort.