A doubling in the number of inmates being released early has been defended by the director general of the Irish Prison Service, who has been accused by prison officers of overseeing a “revolving door” system.
Caron McCaffrey said the early releases were happening in a controlled manner, with supports in place for the prisoners involved.
The number of prisoners currently on so-called temporary release – meaning they have been freed early and are not obliged to return to prison – is 595. This is double the number recorded in March 2023, when the criteria for temporary release was relaxed as prison overcrowding worsened.
Ms McCaffrey said prisoner numbers would be much higher than the current 5,300 if the service did not have the power to grant early release. She said there is a “finite” number of beds in an already overcrowded prison system, and prisoners serving short sentences were at times released early to make way for new committals.
Prince Harry says King Charles ‘won’t speak to him’ and he does not know how long his father has left to live
The homeless university lecturer: ‘There’s a sense of shame around it’
I am the victim of the most middle-class crime ever committed
Sunbeds, melanoma and me: ‘I knew the risks but thought it could never happen’
Plans to add 1,100 prison spaces on existing campuses by 2030 would also help to alleviate overcrowding, she said. Most of those schemes have commenced through the planning or tendering processes, but Ms McCaffrey noted that creating new prison spaces is very expensive.
“Our current annual cost per prison space is €100,000,” she said at the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) annual conference in Galway.
“And building prisons is extremely expensive. In relation to the extra 1,100 places, you’re talking close to half a billion euro in terms of construction at today’s costs.”
Ms McCaffrey said she saw the “benefits” of electronic tagging of prisoners if it were used as an alternative to remanding suspects in custody after they are charged with crimes.
“The remand population has doubled in the last five years, we’ve almost 1,000 people on remand,” Ms McCaffrey said. “And in certain circumstances we are releasing certain [sentenced] people to make way for the remand population because there‘s no potential for us to release anyone who is on remand.”
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan is considering tagging as an alternative to remanding people in custody, which Ms McCarron said would offer “some respite” to the prison system.
Anyone in the community on a tag could be banned from specific places and may be subject to a curfew, all of which could be monitored. However, any intervention made by gardaí in cases of noncompliance would “not necessarily be in real time”.
The prison service had a contract in place with security company Chubb to run a tagging system to monitor prisoners on controlled early release programmes from 2014. Small numbers of prisoners were tagged and, because of the modest scale, the cost per prisoner was prohibitive and the system was discontinued after about five years.
The POA has strongly criticised the prison service over what it says is its slow response to drones being used to deliver drugs, mobile phones and knives to prisoners.
Ms McCaffrey said metal nets have been installed at some prisons, as rope nets were being burned by drones dropping contraband that had been set on fire first, and this had been “extremely successful” to date.
She added that since the metal nets were installed at Mountjoy’s D yard, a section of the Dublin prison where some criminals aligned to the Kinahan cartel are held, “there hasn’t been a single drone, so it’s been incredibly successful”.
The Garda and Irish Prison Service had, last Monday, also signed a memorandum of understanding around tackling crime, including drug smuggling, across the prison system. This included sharing intelligence about criminal gangs, preserving evidence of a crime being committed and disrupting drug smuggling into jails.
