Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

I thank the committee for the invitation to appear before it. If some of what I have to say sounds as if I come from a parallel universe I should show the committee that apart from having written about crime I have also been involved with the Cork auto crime diversion project for about ten years, which is unique, in that it closed not due to a lack of money but because it ran out of car thieves to deal with. If one can buy a company car in Cork, that has failed the national car test, for €20, why does one need to rob one?

I have experience in the field. I am slightly older than Professor Ian O'Donnell. While he can remember reports from 12 to 14 years ago, I can go back 32 years. The first one which came to my notice was a group chaired by Seán MacBride, set up by the Prisoners Rights Organisation, of which the Minister of State, Deputy Joe Costello was a member. It was treated by the Department of Justice and Equality at the time as if it was a group of subversives, though among the subversivies on the committee was Michael D. Higgins and Mary McAleese. From the first five years in 1985, there was a report every year about the prison system and the juvenile justice system. That can be followed up in all the subsequent years. Every two or three years there was a report that laid out the problems and suggested what should be done and we end up with the kind of prison system described by Fr. Peter McVerry. What all the reports share in common is that they advocate a reduction in the prison population and most see alternatives to custody as the means of achieving the reduction.

The second and most significant issue is that they have all largely been ignored and have all failed to have a significant impact on how the penal system operates. Why has there been such a level of failure to act on the issue of prison reform? It appears to me that the committee has to address the question of what it can do that other groups failed to do. The issue is not a shortage of ideas or a shortage of information. There is much information around how to reform prison systems. The issue could well be a lack of political will, a fear of talk show fascism, or a culture of denial among the Department of Justice and Equality about the extent of the problems of the prison and whether prisons actually need to be reformed. In 2006, Fr. Peter McVerry said that St. Patrick's Institution damaged inmates and their conditions had regressed over the previous 21 years. He said that some prison officers "should be immediately dismissed" as they did immense damage to the young people. The director of the Irish Prison Service said that the report was out of date, at best, and, at worst, inaccurate. He rejects its findings. After what we saw last week, which of them is right? Those aspects need to be addressed.

It is not that things have not happened. A plethora of projects has been set up all over the country with the stated aims of diverting from prison, reducing offending and tackling drug use. Many of these projects have been set up as a way to put a claim on community resources and also not to deprive communities. Only a few of them have been systematically evaluated in terms of their effect on offending. What they are part of is what criminologists call bifurcation. They talk about the way in which alternatives to prison grow at the same time as the size of the prison population increases. One of the ways in which this can be explained is that if one adds non-custodial alternatives to the current pool of non-custodial alternatives what happens is that they become interchangeable. Dr. Paul O'Mahony, for example, has argued that one of the things about restorative justice is that it is not being used instead of prison, but instead of some other sanction, a fine, a caution, or whatever. What happens in many of the projects with which I have had contact is that over time they find themselves working with soft-end offenders, offenders with whom it is easier to work and the long-term persistent petty criminals tend not be the people who end up in these projects. If there are alternatives to custody the key question in evaluating their success is whether the prison population falls. Prison does not work and these projects do not work immediately but have a much longer term effect.

A third issue addressed in the submission is the question of cost. It has been argued that alternatives to prison or part of their appeal is that they are cheaper than prison. There is an argument that is not the case. The traditional figure used for the cost of prison is the average cost of prison but the marginal cost of putting another prisoner in prison is quite low. For example, we can double the number of people in prison without having to increase the number of beds. That does not cost any more to get the same number of people in there. The other issue about alternatives to custody is the way in which they are funded, the way in which they are put at arm's length by the Department of Justice and Equality. In other words it will give money to local projects but they are run through voluntary committees. They get people with a huge level of commitment but they raise the usual questions of who in the community gets involved and they seldom have very few young people on them. The staff in these projects have no career structure or career progression and do not have the career security that is necessary for the work they do. The level of commitment given by these people to working with offenders is admirable but the level of staff burnout and staff turnover is very high. If we want people to work with hard end offenders they must be rewarded appropriately.

The final issue I raised is the wider question of how prison systems change. I suggest that at least three factors are important. One way in which prisons change is when the prisoners themselves revolt against prison conditions and then something has to be done. The Attica prison riot is probably the most famous example. The second is when the courts start to imprison middle class offenders, a factor of some significance in the development of open prison and other alternatives in the US. This is unlikely here because the call for the use of prison for the corporate criminal is as old as the call for the reform of the prison system and is equally ineffective. There may be a few tokenistic presentations but do not expect a significant increase in the number of prisoners who come to Mountjoy from Dublin 4 addresses and have to be resettled in Dublin 4 when they emerge from prison. The third factor is an important one. Prison reform in other jurisdictions happened when a country's judiciary has ordered the closure of prisons as a result of human rights abuses, overcrowding and ineffectiveness. In many cases it has little impact on crime levels but when judges closed prisons it forced people to think imaginatively and urgently about what should be done. The Massachusetts juvenile justice system still remains very important here. It is also a fact that the decline in crime in New York, which is one of the most significant declines in the contemporary penal criminology area, was accompanied by a decline in incarceration because what it came up with is more imaginative alternatives to prison.

It is in that context I suggest that the committee could call for the immediate closure of Mountjoy Prison. One could be liberal about it and give them a year in which to do it. If Mountjoy was a hospital and had the same record of failure to cure people, where patients left with more illnesses than they had going in, it would have been closed long ago. The promise or the threat of closure would concentrate minds and lead to creative thinking about how to deal with offending behaviour.