Ms Catherine Maher:

It is important there is a structure in place to enable people to avoid prison while serving their sentences in managed way. We are currently finishing an evaluation of our three services and we will have good recommendations stemming from those in line with identifying other avenues for alternatives to prison sentences. The reason for focusing on that is the overcrowding that is happening in the prisons. We must address that because overcrowding is the cause of unplanned early release. If we can address that we can have a way to manage the situation.

Currently we operate two programmes, one in Dublin and one in Waterford, in partnership with the Probation Services. These are community service projects, where people finish off their probation, serve time in the community and are linked in with supervisors from the Probation Services. It operates on a three to five day programme, where they come in two or three days a week and serve a number of hours, doing work such as gardening and painting and decorating. That is all managed and supervised by a maintenance team in cooperation with the Probation Service and it is working well. It has been so successful in Waterford that we have been asked to extend it into another project we have in Ferrybank. We have a report on that coming out soon and we will pass that to the committee so it can see how successful it has been.