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Prison overcrowding crisis is forcing policy makers to turn to increasingly radical solutions

Report from the Prison Overcrowding Response Group paints a stark picture of Ireland’s penal institutions

Cloverhill Prison. In February, Helen McEntee was warned that in a worse cases scenario, the prison population would hit 5,054 by 2027, a number the Irish Prison Service would be unable to handle. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Cloverhill Prison. In February, Helen McEntee was warned that in a worse cases scenario, the prison population would hit 5,054 by 2027, a number the Irish Prison Service would be unable to handle. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Conor Gallagher's picture
Conor Gallagher
Wed Oct 16 2024 - 06:00

The report from the Prison Overcrowding Response Group paints a stark picture of Ireland’s penal institutions.

The desperately crowded conditions in many of the country’s 14 prisons pose a safety risk to staff and inmates, it said. Last year there was a 66 per cent increase in prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. Earlier this month, prisoner Martin Salinger was stabbed to death in an attack in Cloverhill Prison.

It also poses dangers for the community at large, said the group which is made up of senior prison and justice officials. Overcrowding means officers are frequently redirected to security duties, leaving little time for education and rehabilitation work and making it less likely prisoners will be able to reintegrate on their release.

“This ultimately results in an increased threat to public safety,” the group said.

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In some ways, the problem is even worse than that presented in the group’s report which was given to Minister for Justice Helen McEntee earlier this year.

In February, the group predicted that, in a worse cases scenario, the prison population would hit 5,054 by 2027, a number the Irish Prison Service would be unable to handle.

By Tuesday this week, the number in custody was 5,055 or 112 per cent of capacity.

This makes the report’s prediction of a prison population of 6,000 by the early 2030s appear hopelessly optimistic.

Saoirse Brady, executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), said the State is not only in breach of international standards, it is also in violation of its own prison safety limits.

[ Prison overcrowding making drug problem worse, warns Irish Penal Reform Trust ]

The report, she said, echoes many of the concerns aired by the IPRT, the Inspector of Prisons and the Prison Officers Association in recent months and years.

The scale of the problem is such that authorities have already taken drastic steps, including in 2022, releasing all low-risk offenders serving less than a year and in 2023 significantly relaxing the qualifying criteria for temporary release programmes.

This has done little to slow the increase in prison numbers, leaving policymakers to resort to even more radical proposals.

As revealed today, these include urgent recommendations for McEntee to extend temporary release to prisoners convicted of serious crimes, including sexual offenders, prolific burglars and other “high-risk” cohorts.

Temporary release in these cases would mean granting, on a case by case, early release to prisoners. They would be returned to the community under strict conditions, including in some cases electronic monitoring.

No matter the conditions, such a move could be politically toxic for a Minister who is facing into a general election and has been accused in the past of being soft on crime.

It is no surprise then than she vetoed the recommendations regarding high risk and sexual offenders while accepting others.

For her part, McEntee has recently introduced several pieces of legislation designed to appeal to law-and-order voters. These include increasing the minimum term for life sentence prisoners and tougher sentencing for knife crimes and assaults on gardaí.

She has also significantly expanded the law around sexual violence and domestic abuse.

These laws, combined with a commitment to hire more judges and gardaí, will inevitably result in more people going to prison.

By addressing one problem, the Minister is making another worse. According to the overcrowding report, violent and sexual offenders “are the largest cohort taking up the greatest amount of prison space”.

However, the main driver of increasing prison numbers is Ireland’s record population increase, noted the group. And there is little chance of this changing, meaning the Government has to build many more cells, find a way of sending less people to prison or some combination of both.

The clear preference of the senior civil servants who make up the overcrowding group is increasing the number of offenders who serve their sentences outside prison. Large numbers of prisoners were granted emergency temporary release during the Covid-19 pandemic and this had little or no impact on public safety, they noted.

“The situation requires a wholesale change in judicial practices, and in sentencing and investment priorities,” says Dr Ian Marder, Assistant Professor in Criminology at Maynooth University.

“The challenge is that this needs to be done immediately to avert disaster.”