Fr. Peter McVerry:

When we talk about addiction, we must include alcohol as one of the substances which may potentially drive people towards crime. I understand that 80% of all monetary crime is related to drugs, that is, the perpetrators engage in crime in order to acquire the money to purchase drugs. There has been a huge increase in drug misuse in recent years. Moreover, we are seeing new drugs with increasingly psychotic effects and drugs which arouse aggression and violence in those who consume them. A user told me the other day that crystal meth is the new drug on the block and that coming down from it causes a depression like nothing he had experienced before. When he is coming down, he said, he would kill his granny to get another fix.

In my experience, many prisoners would love to deal constructively with their drug problem but do not, unfortunately, have the opportunity to do so. I am involved in a small project where, with the consent of the relevant judges, I bring people from Cloverhill Prison down to the drug treatment centre in Athy run by Sr. Consilio. I have accompanied approximately 120 prisoners there in recent years.

I get a huge number of requests from people in Cloverhill Prison and in other prisons at they approach the end of their sentence asking if I could get them a place on a drug treatment programme as they do not wish to be released back on to the streets to fall into the same pattern of drug misuse. I believe there is a real appetite among drug users to deal with their problem. One of the triggers that brings that about is the possibility of a prison sentence looming over them. If we expanded the opportunities for drug treatment within the community, I believe that considerably fewer people would go to prison.

In terms of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977 - this is interesting because drugs were not a problem here in 1977 - a far-sighted civil servant proposed that an alterative to imprisonment would be a custodial drug treatment centre. Instead of people being handed down a sentence, they would be sent to a custodial drug treatment centre and would still be locked up but in that centre they could deal with their addiction and provided they dealt with it, successfully completed the programme and presumably were under the supervision of a probation officer afterwards, they would not receive a prison sentence. We do not have a custodial drug treatment centre in this country more than 30 years later. That provision has real potential for reducing the prison population.

I was on the Whitaker commission and went to visit some of the prisons in Sweden and one of the ways the Swedes address prison overcrowding is by putting a limit on the number of people in prison. If one is sentenced to imprisonment there, one goes on a waiting list, a little like accessing hospital services here. That was one of the ways the Swedes addressed overcrowding in prisons. They also had a mandatory 30-day imprisonment for drink-driving. That meant many middle class people went to prison, which meant that prison conditions improved considerably. I am not advocating that but it is an interesting point.