Irish prison service

There are certain areas of our society that we give little thought to and our prison service is definitely one that tends to slip through the cracks. The Irish prison service rarely makes the headlines in a positive sense and, this week in The Journal, our insight to life behind bars is also a very negative one. The service is creaking and has been for a number of years. Our prisons are old, cramped and riddled with the worst of social problems.

These are problems we have decided to ignore. Most of our population do not feel that prisoners merit much consideration during their time behind bars. It is an understandable viewpoint, as prisoners are the lowest form of human in many eyes. They have committed crimes against society and are paying a price that we deem appropriate. They are also out of sight and out of mind. But prisoners are human beings. And our society must deal with why they are behind bars and what they will do when released from jail.

This week we speak to Valerie Bresnihan and she paints a gloomy picture of the Irish prison system. Drug use is rampant, we have nearly 3,000 asylum-related inmates, one in six people is in prison for failure to pay fines, the reading age of an average prisoner is 10 years of age and psychological deficiencies could affect up to 70% of the prison population.

This is just some of the bad news.

The worst news is the certainty that prison will only have compounded a person’s personality disorders, and we are breeding hardened criminals in our jail system. Many will re-offend, and most who do tend to move up the scale of serious crime.

This does not serve us well.

Our society needs people leaving prison in a better state than which they entered. It is not happening. The opposite is the case according to Valerie and as former head of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, she should know.

Thrown into this mix is the startling fact that we have the most expensive prison system in Europe. We have more prison officers than prisoners and they are probably the best-paid civil servants in the country.

Where is the progress?

On the costs side, Minister McDowell deserves credit for his attempts to rein in costs of prison officer overtime, but progress is slow. The new prison, planned to replace the dinosaur that is Mountjoy, is far from certain to go ahead and is fast becoming a political football.

Politics and crime are happy bedfellows. There are always votes for the "tough-on-crime" merchant, but few for those who are serious about tackling the causes of crime. There is a reason why we feel the need for alarms and locking all of our doors at night; there are people out there who are driven to a life of crime because they never knew anything else.

Environment is the root cause for the violent criminal and this is where our focus should lie. Our prisons are littered with people who never got a proper chance in life and our prisons only accelerate the downward trajectory of the people who have fallen through the cracks. Rehabilitation is possible and studies prove it can work. But we don’t really want to know about it. We want to feel safe and protected, preferring the road more travelled.

Read Valerie Bresnihan’s thoughts, and think about another road.