Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief as I do not want to keep everyone here all day. We heard yesterday that recidivism in this area was much lower than we had thought. In 2013, the Irish Prison Service conducted a study on re-offending which found that the offence groups with the lowest rates of re-offending were homicide, at 26.2%, followed by sexual offences, at 28.2%. While it is obvious that the rate of re-offending would be low in cases of homicide, the re-offending rate for a sexual offender is also low compared with a crime like burglary where the re-offending rate stands at 79.5%. We are concerned that this legislation is based more on anecdotal evidence than empirical evidence. It is more likely fuelled by a crime reporting element in the media who whip up a frenzy at every chance they get. We do not often make positive statements about the media but I want to read a short quote from an article written by Michael Clifford this week. He stated:

... policy is supposed to be made on the basis of research and evidence which points towards a better way of doing things. Among many politicians - and many elements of the media - research in this area is to be avoided in case it unearths inconvenient truths.

He was referring to this very subject.

I have asked some members of the legal profession what they think of mandatory sentencing and there is not much goodwill towards it. When it was introduced about 20 years ago it was a knee-jerk reaction to a drug problem that was not resolved by this approach. Instead, it helped to fill up the prisons and drive up the cost to the State of looking after people who had been carrying drugs of one form or another. The Law Reform Commission has done some serious research on that issue and I want to highlight a couple of points it made in its report. It noted the need to ensure that the provisions achieved their stated objectives and facilitated a reduction in crime. They did not do so, however. The report also stated that many of those coming before the courts were low-level drug users rather than high-level drug barons and that we end up throwing the foot soldiers in jail, rather than addressing the real problem. It pointed out that the aims of deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation are not being met by this approach and that the principles of consistency and proportionality are being ignored by mandatory sentencing.

So-called experts or people who do research, and Mick Clifford touched on this in his article this week, are sometimes frowned upon but we ignore them at our peril. Anyone who tuned in to yesterday's committee proceedings would have been incredibly impressed by the lady from Limerick University who has done a good deal of research in this area.

I certainly do not agree with the notion that we should ignore these people.