MINORITY representation in criminal justice is or should be a concern within the Irish justice system, according to an expert on juvenile justice.
Nicola Carr of the Children’s Research Centre in Trinity College was writing in a report on Minorities, Crime and Justice, launched by Minister of State for Integration Conor Lenihan yesterday.
Mr Lenihan said his office was working to ensure the type of social tensions between immigrants and local population that some other European countries have experienced would not emerge in Ireland.
“This is especially important now during a time of economic downturn when such tensions have a tendency to surface,” he said. He stressed that members of minority communities were no more likely to commit crimes than were Irish people, and were also often the victims of crime.
The report was the proceedings of a conference last year organised by the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development, an NGO whose membership is drawn from Government policy makers, gardaí, lawyers, judges, academics, probation officers, prison personnel and individuals from the voluntary and community sector.
Travellers and members of minorities are over-represented in the criminal justice system, Ms Carr said. Using information from prison statistics, she said the proportion of “non-Irish” held in Irish custodial institutions in 2006 was 29 per cent.
When immigration-related incarceration was removed, it left a figure of 17.6 per cent. The census for the same year showed that 10.6 per cent of the population was non-Irish.
While the prison service does not identify Travellers, the census data identified the number of Travellers in “communal establishments” such as hospitals and prisons, and this showed that they represented 4.6 per cent of the prison population on census night, while the proportion of Travellers in the population as a whole is 0.5 per cent, she said.
David Joyce said that it could be shown from an analysis of historical legislation that Travellers had been criminalised for many centuries, and that this legacy carries over into modern legislation.
This meant that the historical relationship between Travellers and members of the Garda Síochána was one of mistrust, he said.