Mr. John Clinton:

The first point is that it is a separate entity. The people in Grendon prison who are on the project are in a standalone unit. They are not mixing with the general prison population. It would be akin to going into any Irish prison, taking a wing of it and designating it as a unit of therapy and education and determining that only prisoners involved in the unit will be housed on that wing. The plan, the project and everything that goes on in it is specifically confined to that area. The prisoners who are on the project mix with each other but they do not mix with anyone else. There is a lot of peer pressure on each of them when they go onto the project to stay on board with the programme. For example, prisoners who have spent a long time in prison and have learned that it is not a great way to live one's life, impart that knowledge to new prisoners. This is the concept behind the Spanish project. The older prisoners who have been through the system, who want to get out and to change can influence the younger prisoners and teach them about the flaws of going down the road of spending their whole lives going in and out of prison. They teach the younger prisoners how not to do that, after they have gone through the UTE.

We could choose to introduce this concept in any part of the Irish prison system. We could announce that the services of the counselling and therapeutic community are being made available in a certain portion of the prison system. It would be possible to take this approach with a prisoner within a day or two. He would not need to have been in prison for a long time. The people who run the project would assess the prisoner to determine whether it is worth including him in it. Each prisoner selected for the project would be given one, two or three chances, but if it became clear that he was not playing his correct part in it, he would be moved out of it and someone else would be given his place. There is a huge incentive for the prisoner in this approach. It was very worthwhile to sit through the counselling with the prisoners to get their views and hear how they felt about things. For example, the day we were there the prisoners were asked whether their social backgrounds got them into trouble. This was relevant because some of them were going back into those environments. It was interesting to hear one prisoner say openly and honestly that he was in prison because of the acts he had committed. He did not want to hear about his social background because he had moved on from it. The prisoners were open and honest about the crimes they had committed and everything they had done. It was counselling at a very heavy level. People had to take breaks after an hour and a half of these sessions before they could come back to them. It was very worthwhile. I think it would be worth exploring in the Irish prison system.

The issue of finding buildings in which this can be done is not a huge one. The issue is the will to start looking at new types of systems. When we were introducing incentivised regimes in to the Irish prison system, I visited Maghaberry Prison in Northern Ireland, where a similar system was running. When they locked the unit at night time, no prison staff were present and prisoners could go in and out of their cells until a specific time to use toilets, etc. When I looked at that as someone who had worked as a prison officer on the floor, I asked what would happen if a prisoner collapsed in his cell or something like that. The prison officer in charge assured me that someone would ring for an ambulance in the same way that someone would do so if a person collapsed in his or her home. We could understand where he came from when he said that. Local prison managers were fearful about introducing something like that because they felt there would be a blame culture if anything went wrong. They were concerned that there would not be a non-blame culture. When more modern systems of penal reform like the Villabona project or the Grendon approach are being introduced, it is important to bring staff along by reassuring them that there will not be a blame culture if something goes wrong. There is no doubt that mistakes are made when modern processes like this are being introduced. Such problems will be overcome because they have been overcome in other countries where these systems still work.