5th March 2025
On 5 March 2025, Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) Executive Director Saoirse Brady wrote in the Irish Times about the recently published Office of the Inspector of Prisons Annual Report 2023 that lays bare the sheer scale of human rights breaches and the lack of dignity faced by people in prison custody.
Key points that Saoirse raises in the letter:
Read the letter in The Irish Times: Overcrowded prisons and breaches of human rights
Copy of the letter:
Sir, – The recent article “Overcrowding in jails is leading to ‘inter-prisoner violence’, inspector finds” (News, February 28th) makes for compelling reading and lays bare the sheer scale of human rights breaches and the lack of dignity faced by people currently in custody.
The deprivation of a person’s liberty alone is a core punitive sanction that has a long-lasting and often traumatic impact on an individual – the conditions and treatment experienced by individuals in prison should not be used as an additional punishment. Yet the Office of the Inspector of Prisons (OIP) Annual Report 2023 is clear that due to the significant levels of overcrowding right across our prison estate, the Irish Prison Service is unable to uphold the rights of many in its care.
Reports of people, four to a cell having to eat meals off the floor beside unpartitioned toilets, having limited access to clean clothes or showers in some instances and being locked in cells for more than 22 hours a day without meaningful human contact or purposeful activity, demonstrate the urgent nature of this crisis. These unacceptable, degrading and frankly dehumanising conditions put immense pressure on individuals accommodated there as well as the staff who have to work in such a volatile environment.
Concerningly, this report relates to 2023, well before we reached record levels of overcrowding in summer 2024, records that continue to be broken regularly. Despite the report being submitted to the Minister for Justice on March 29th, 2024, it was only published late last Friday afternoon when it also competed with the news that we have yet again reached record levels of homelessness.
Yet the two are not completely unconnected. As the Chief Inspector highlighted in his report, “It was very apparent that Cloverhill Prison was acting as a ‘social safety net’ as a result of wider systemic failures to address causes of offending, such as drug addiction and homelessness”. He also noted that there was “continued reliance on imprisonment to address low-level offending” and while these comments related to one prison, the same is happening right across the country.
While we in the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) are encouraged by the recent comments and commitment by Minister of Justice Jim O’Callaghan to progress legislation on community-based sanctions for people convicted of non-violent offences, after years in the making, it cannot come soon enough and must be prioritised.
The Chief Inspector’s already outdated report provides an eye-opening insight into the reality of life in prison for the more than 5,000 men and women currently in custody. We echo the Chief Inspector’s view that this is not a problem that the Irish Prison Service can resolve alone or that the State can build its way out of, and encourage the Government to heed his call to put in place an enforceable ceiling on the number of people who can safely be held in each prison.
More than this, we need investment in proven solutions to deal with people who offend in a more effective, humane, and less costly manner which ultimately leads to more resilient individuals, safer communities and fewer people in the criminal justice system. – Yours, etc,
SAOIRSE BRADY,
Executive Director,
Irish Penal Reform Trust,
Dublin 7.
Respect for rights in the penal system with prison as a last resort.