The underfunding of the probation services is leading to many people being imprisoned unnecessarily, Sean Lowry tells Conor Lally
The words of homeless inmates are peppered throughout a major new study on the prison service - and they make for depressing reading.
"You get into a routine [in prison], sleeping and all that. Sleep and eat. More than what you would on the outside," is how one imprisoned homeless 17-year-old inmate sums up his life.
Another 25-year-old homeless prisoner says: "I've spent most of the past 10 years in prison - I haven't spent one Christmas or one birthday out of prison since 1993." And a 50-year-old man in Mountjoy Prison says: "You feel like a leper."
The report reveals that 54 per cent of the State's 3,200 prisoners have a history of homelessness. One in four people are homeless on committal to prison. And of these, three-quarters are heroin and cocaine users and two-thirds have spent time in a psychiatric hospital.
The 150-page report, A Study of the Number, Profile and Progression Routes of Homeless Persons Before the Court and in Custody, was commissioned by the Probation and Welfare Services and funded by the Department of Justice. It involved a review of 10,000 cases in 2003.
Sean Lowry, who has just ended a three-year term as head of the Probation and Welfare Services, is not surprised by the findings.
"It confirms what we have known for some time - that a lot of people who should not be there are ending up in prison." He questions the Government's plans to increase prison spaces by 1,000 to 4,200.
"I think it's the wrong direction," he says. "The numbers of people in custody are reasonably low but they are higher than they need to be. This piece of research is bearing that out, that there are lots of people in the prisons who don't need to be there. They are there because the resources have not been made available in the probation service to advise the judges what they need to know."
Lowry moved from his native Belfast and first began working as a probation officer in Dublin 32 years ago. The services provided by probation and welfare have remained broadly the same over those years.
Probation officers assess offenders before sentencing, submitting a report to the sentencing judge as to the risk posed by an individual. Such reports also advise judges on the suitability of an offender for prison or non-custodial sanctions. The service runs community-based sanction programmes for offenders who are not imprisoned. It also works with jailed offenders in helping them to identify and overcome their criminal behaviour.
Lowry says that, after years of depleted resources, the system has been severely compromised. The result is that the prison population is now made up of many homeless, drug-addicted or psychiatrically ill people.
"The credibility of the probation service in the criminal justice system is weakened because it's being starved of resources. As long as that continues to happen they are going to lose more credibility. Judges say to the probation service: 'We want your service but you can't give it to us'.
"I think if something isn't done to improve the resources of the service it may be increasingly ignored by judges in district courts and in circuit courts. It will lead to further pressure on the prison system. Now you've maybe two-thirds the number in prison as you have on supervision [by the probation services] in the community. The EU average would be two-and-a-half people on supervision for every one in prison. There was a finding by the Council of Europe a few years back that Ireland sends in to custody the highest proportion of young people of any country. That's the kind of major research that needs to be taken into account and needs to addressed."
"If the probation service was put in a position where it could provide these assessments to the courts, the numbers of people going to prison would be greatly reduced. And there wouldn't be the perceived need to increase the number of prison spaces."
"Talking ball park figures, I think the staffing resources of the probation and welfare service need to be doubled. I would say that with the investment of an extra €25 million per year you could double [staffing levels]. I'm talking about an increase from €41 million to €65 million. I'm not talking here in hundreds of millions. As a proportion of the overall justice vote it is very small, but it's absolutely critical."
At present the probation services employ 330 staff, compared with 3,100 prison officers in the prison system. Its €41 million budget is €24 million less than was spent on prison officer overtime in 2003. This year's budget for the State's entire justice system is €2 billion.
By way of example, Lowry points to Dublin's Mountjoy Prison, which has housed as many as 700 inmates in recent years, but only four probation officers have been assigned. "You'd need a team of 20," he says.
As new prisons have been added to the system, existing numbers of probation officers have been "stretched" across the country to meet the new demands.
In the case of juvenile detention centres - which cost the exchequer up to €250,000 per inmate per year - probation and welfare resources do not allow the supervision of released youths. Fifty per cent of these end up in St Patrick's Institution in Dublin or in an adult prison within six to 18 months of their release. And 90 per cent reoffend during that period.
"I think that the Minister for Justice has put himself into a position where, having put a lot of resources into the prison system, he could easily justify the development of community sanctions.
Research into the effectiveness [of community sanctions] could be used to persuade the public that there is a better way of doing things.
"We put imprisonment centre-stage and by putting all the resources that we do into the development of a prison system we're making imprisonment the sanction of first resort rather than the sanction of last resort.
"We need to have people in the Department of Justice to think in terms of dealing effectively with as many offenders as possible in the community rather than making use of prisons. The Department is much too focused on developing the prison system. The more [an offender's] situation is allowed to descend into dysfunction the more it costs the taxpayer."