Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 December 2020

Public Accounts Committee

2019 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 21 - Prisons
Chapter 7 – Catering and Ancillary Services in Prisons

11:30 am

Ms Caron McCaffrey:

I might just say, in relation to Xboxes generally, we operate an incentivised regimes policy within our prisons, so the more appropriate a prisoner's behaviour in custody and the more he engages positively with services, the more benefits he gets. It is the case that some prisoners in custody can have Xboxes. We do not buy the versions currently on the market. We buy second-hand versions and ensure that any ability to operate Wi-Fi or engage online is decommissioned. I can come back to the Deputy about where purchases have been made from. There are security reasons as to why we buy the older versions. Work is then done internally to ensure that they meet our security parameters and cannot be used to communicate with people on the outside. I do not have that specific piece of information that the Deputy has asked for, but we will commit to coming back to him on that.

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