Jail spaces badly needed, prison officers told

The State urgently needs additional jail places because prisoners were serving longer sentences and there is a higher rate of prisoners on remand, the director general of the Irish Prison Service said today.

At the annual conference of the Prison Officers' Association in Ennis, Mr Sean Aylward said substantial investment was required in the prison service to reflect changes among those in detention.

He said ten years ago 70 prisoners were serving life sentences, a figure which had more than doubled to 162 at the moment. Over the same period the number of remand prisoners rose from 116 to 564. He said these factors alone justify some investment in prison accommodation.

Mr Aylward also denied a suggestion from prison officers' representatives that overcrowding in jails was seeing a return of the revolving door system.

He said five years ago one in five of the prison population was on temporary release and a very high proportion of them were on unstructured temporary release.

Today less than one in 10 are on temporary release. And of these, 325 people today, Mr Aylward said, are people on "set out structured programmes".

The suggested new 1,000 place Mountjoy Prison would offer additional capacity, he added. Mr Aylward said the Office of Public Works was evaluating 28 possible sites within a 25-kilometre radius of Dublin for the new prison.

The changing prisoner demographic was reflected in the trebling of the number of women to 120 since the 1990s. Mr Aylward admitted he was concerned about the higher rates of women on unstructured temporary release because this differed from the approach taken with male prisoners.

Non-national prisoner numbers have also increased significantly. Mr Alyward said there were 2,608 committals of non-nationals to prison in 2003, up 66 per cent since 2001.

Mr Aylward told RTE Radio 1  he would "be guarded about saying anything negative about non nationals. They would probably be as law abiding a group as any other group.  But they are present in much greater numbers than they were a few years ago."

He stressed this increase reflected the rise in Ireland's non-national population and the high proportion detained on immigration-related issues.