Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will pick up where we left off. I wanted to ask earlier about recidivism rates. To have any prisoner find himself back in prison is a failure in terms of how we are setting up our Prison Service, or perhaps not our Prison Service but all of society. There are a number of reasons to choose to incarcerate somebody, such as punishment or the safety of wider society, but we need to have a real and honest focus on the rehabilitation piece. We can approach that from the political perspective of wanting to better people and improve their lives, or we can approach it from the very hard-nosed economic point of view that it is very expensive to keep people in prisons.

If someone is in prison, we have an opportunity - for example, I spoke about educational psychologists and addressing such things as learning difficulties - to try our best to ensure that person does not come back to prison. What are the recidivism rates and where do we sit in an international context?