Mr. Michael Donnellan:

We operate within the European context, under the Council of Europe, so the director generals of all prison and probation services meet every year to discuss certain topics. We are also the founding member of the European Organisation of Prison and Correctional Services, EuroPris. All prisons in Europe join it. Some 30 prison systems are now part of EuroPris. We can benchmark ourselves against those prisons, ask those prisons a question and get 29 answers back on a topic. We have a lot of contact there. More important, we are part of what is called a benchmarking group, which is made up of Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Our statisticians meet every year, and we benchmark ourselves against each other and against the same criteria. For instance, the Council of Europe figures benchmark people for a whole range of staff who are not in the prison. In Norway and Sweden, they have what is called the import model. Many of their services are imported from the community, including health services, education services and work training services. In our system, we hire our own work training officers and our own health services at the moment. The only thing we import is education. When we are benchmarked like for like, of who is inside the prison wall, this is what we get.

We see that Denmark has 1.1 prisoners to every member staff, Finland has 1.3, we have 1.2, the Netherlands has 0.9, and Norway and Sweden each have one for one. Taken in that context, we are not too far out from the norm. We were much better five years ago when we had massive overcrowding, but that was not effective, efficient or beneficial. Communities were not safer when we had 30% more prisoners being managed by approximately the same number of prison officers. The prison officer is the key change agent within a prison. It is not the psychologist or psychiatrist; it is the class officer who intervenes with prisoners every day on the landing. That is what can bring about massive change. We are in the zone when compared with the other members of our benchmarking group. If we want quality prisons, we have to pay for quality staff in appropriate numbers. That is not to say we cannot be more efficient.