Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 108: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the statistics of the extent of re-offending among people who have been convicted to jail sentences; the measures of recidivism he uses as a policy target when assessing the performance of the prison and probation service; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [14358/10]

Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)
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I wish to advise the Deputy that the Irish Prison Service facilitated a major study of prisoner re-offending by the UCD Institute of Criminology. The study found that 27.4% of released prisoners were serving a new prison sentence with one year. This rose to 39.2% after two years, 45.1% after three years, and 49.2% after four years. The fact that over 50% of prisoners do not re-offend within four years of release compares well internationally.

The Prison Service provides a range of rehabilitative programmes which have the dual purpose of providing prisoners with purposeful activity while serving their sentences and encouraging and equipping them to lead productive lives on release. Prisoner rehabilitation involves significant multi-dimensional input by a diverse range of general and specialist services provided both by the Irish Prison Service and in-reach statutory and non-statutory services. Amongst these are healthcare, psychiatric, psychological, educational, work and training, vocational, counselling, welfare and spiritual services. These services are important in addressing offending behaviour, drug and alcohol addiction, missed educational and vocational opportunities, anger management, and self management in the interest of encouraging positive personal development in prisoners, and preparing them for re-integration and resettlement on release from custody. In addition, the Probation Service has an active role during the course of the prisoner's sentence in helping maintain links with family and community agencies, encouraging prisoners to address their offending behaviour and engaging prisoners in individual counselling and group counselling programmes such as offending behaviour, addiction, violence and sex offending.

The Irish Prison Service is developing and rolling out a fully co-ordinated Integrated Sentence Management system (ISM) across all prisons and places of detention. ISM involves a new emphasis on prisoners taking greater personal responsibility for their own development through active engagement with both specialist and non-specialist services in the prisons. The end result will be a prisoner-centred approach to working with prisoners with provision for initial assessment, goal setting and periodic review to measure progress.

ISM was first introduced on a pilot basis in Arbour Hill and Wheatfield prisons. During 2009, it was extended to additional numbers of prisoners in these prisons and was also initiated in the Training Unit and the Midlands Prison. Preparatory work also commenced in St Patrick's Institution. Altogether over 200 prisoners have participated in ISM to date. Parallel work on a range of necessary system supports such as the development of an IT database and staff training is ongoing. It is envisaged that ISM will be consolidated in these five prisons in 2010, with approximately 500 prisoners participating by the end of the year. ISM will continue to be rolled out to all other institutions on a phased basis, subject to the availability of resources.

In addition, as the Deputy will be aware the Probation Service of my Department works in partnership with a range of community based projects to assist it with its core work. These projects -numbering about 50 — will receive in the region of €11m in funding this year from my Department. The projects support the work of the Service in re-integrating ex-offenders back to society by providing a range of supports such as work training, support with tackling addiction issues, accommodation needs etc. This range of supportive work also contributes to reducing re-offending and enhancing community safety.