Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We need better spaces. The punishment for a person who commits a crime is the loss of liberty. What is happening after that point seems to be a compounding of punishment for a person. Not everyone is the same, but many people who go in there for a particular reason – the Minister just outlined drugs and drug-related crime – are dealing with their own addictions, and there are other people too. The loss of liberty is the punishment, but what seems to happen is when they go in there, the facilities are overcrowded. I appreciate, though, that this may be the case for some people who go in, particularly those in the throes of alcoholism. However, we do not have a prison in this country that is drug-free. People go into our prisons with an addiction and they come out with their addiction compounded. I do not want to say access to treatment facilities, rehabilitation and trauma-informed care are non-existent because of course they exist to some degree, but not to the extent they are needed. I am not opposed to the idea of having more prison spaces but we should be talking about better prisons. What does a recovery incarceration look like? If the Minister is talking about building more prisons, which he is, can we have a conversation about what a better prison would look like?