David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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The purpose of today's meeting is a discussion on submissions on penal reform, including information on international best practice. I thank all of the witnesses for attending today's meeting and for the submissions which they previously supplied to the sub-committee. The sub-committee will first hear a brief opening statement from each of the witnesses, following which there will be a questions and answers session.

I welcome Mr. John Costello, chairman of the Parole Board, Dr. Kevin Warner, researcher on penal policy, Fr. Peter McVerry and Mr. Eoin Carroll, Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dr. Ciaran McCullagh, UCC, and Professor Ian O'Donnell, UCD.

Members have received the submissions and any opening statement received has also been circulated. The running order is as I listed the delegates.

Witnesses should note that they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their evidence to the sub-committee. However, if they are directed by it to cease giving evidence on a particular matter and continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should not criticise or make charges against any person or persons or an entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable. Members should be aware that, under the salient rulings of the Chair, they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses or an official either by name in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

We established the sub-committee on penal reform earlier in the year, have held a number of hearings and done some work. We plan to travel to Finland in the next number of weeks to see what has been done there. We are told the sector exercises best practice. We are interested in obtaining the advice of the delegates before we go. The full committee will visit Cork Prison tomorrow and we have already visited Mountjoy Prison, St. Patrick's Institution and Wheatfield Prison. We plan to visit as many prisons as we can in the near future.

We want to be challenged. I note from the submissions that the delegates are in a challenging mode. However, as we want to challenge the system rather than just ourselves, I look forward to our interaction with them.

Mr. John Costello:

I thank the Chairman and sub-committee members for inviting me to attend. I would like to summarise my submission which I sent to the sub-committee in August.

When I took over as chairman of the Parole Board July 2011, there were regular delays in reviewing the cases of prisoners. From 2013, however, I am hopeful that all prisoners will be reviewed by the board on time. If there are delays, the individual prisoner will be notified and informed when the review will take place. From feedback we have received, it appears that many prisoners are not fully aware of the work of the board. Accordingly, in the next 12 months I hope to visit all the prisons and have meetings with the relevant prisoners to inform them about the work of the board. Only today we had a board meeting inArbour Hill Prison and I had a meeting with a number of prisoners about the parole process. I hope to speak to prisoners in Wheatfield Prison and the Midlands Prison in November.

There is no formal training of board members before they are appointed to the Parole Board. I have introduced a system whereby the board is addressed, at most meetings, by a member of the Irish Prison Service, the Probation Service or the psychology service on relevant matters. One of the problems we have identified is that there is only a small number of fixed-term prisoners participating in the parole process. Most of the prisoners participating are serving a life sentence. The following initiatives might be helpful to encourage these prisoners to participate in the process.
The Prisons Act 2007 provides for 33% remission for those who engage with the rehabilitation services. This provision has been used infrequently and the Parole Board could play an important role in this area in terms of enhanced remission.Many prisoners sentenced to life or a long prison sentence are not aware of what steps they should take to improve themselves while in prison. The initiative of the integrated sentence management scheme is to be welcomed, but it should apply to all long-term prisoners, especially those serving a life sentence.

The Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter, has suggested prisoners might be reviewed after four or five years by the Parole Board. While welcoming this idea, the board could not review greater numbers of prisoners without increased resources, as well as without increased resources for the probation and psychology services which must prepare reports for it. When a prisoner is released on remission, it is not possible for supervision orders to be made. It is only when a prisoner is released onparole or given temporary release that supervision orders or conditions can be made. This is a problem which causes complications in practice.

I will mention some points on life sentence prisoners. It is important that such prisoners are given a sentence plan from the start of their sentence. As mentioned, it is hoped the integrated sentence management scheme will deal with this matter. The Parole Board only reviews life sentence prisoners after they have served a sentence of seven years, but it might be helpful for it to review them after four or five years. However, a life sentence prisoner was recently granted parole, with the Minister's consent, after serving a sentence of 12 or 13 years. He was a model prisoner and quite exceptional inhow he had rehabilitated during his prison sentence. He hasoffered to speak to other life sentence prisoners when we are addressing them in the next 12 months or so.
Life sentence prisoners can become institutionalised if they have served 15 or 16 years or more in prison. The Parole Board, inconjunction with the Irish Prison Service, should give special attention to such prisoners. If a prisoner in the United Kingdom is sentenced following a murder conviction, he or she normally receives the benefit of a tariff, or a minimum sentence which the court directs he or she must serve. If he or she subsequently transfers to Ireland and continues his or her sentence in Ireland, he or she loses the benefit of this tariff, as Irish law applies and there is no recognition of tariffs imposed by the English courts. The Law Reform Commission, in a report earlier this year on mandatory sentencing, recommended that courts might be given discretion to recommend a minimum sentence which persons convicted of murder might serve. There is merit in this suggestion, but sentencing guidelines would be essential if such reforms were to be introduced.
The privacy of prisoners should be respected after they have been released from prison, but quite often the press have noregard for these issues.On a related point, elderly prisoners and prisoners suffering from intellectual disabilities should receive special treatment in prison. More resources are needed to assist the Probation Service when helping prisoners who are released to reintegrate into society. If the numbers of prisoners are reduced in the prisons, with a subsequent saving of money, such savings should be transferred to the Probation Service.

The Minister has confirmed that the Parole Board will be placed on a statutory footing and mentioned that he hopes the legislation will be introduced in2014. However, if this reform is introduced, there should be an appeals process from the board to a tribunal or other appropriate body. I also have a concern that when the board is placed on a statutory footing, there could be increased demand from prisoners for legal representation. I am in favour of legal representation in some but not all cases. There could also be a greater number of judicial reviews of board decisions and these matters would have to be examined.

Iwelcome recent initiatives such as the community release scheme, the new incentivised regimes policy andthe new integrated management programme. I also welcome the community integrated plan which will be developed nine months prior to the release of a prisoner back into the community. I congratulate the Irish Prison Service, the Probation Service and the psychology service for all the excellent work they do.

Dr. Kevin Warner:

I thank the members of the sub-committee for the invitation to attend. My submission makes the case that there are multiple aspects of the prison system crying out for reform. We can see this whether we look at the overall or macro aspects of the prison system, or whether we look at what happens to individual men and women in prison, in other words, when we look at the conditions in which they are held, what it is like to be in a typical cell and so forth. In all these aspects of the prison system I stress that there are very strong models for doing things in a far better way such as, for example, in the Nordic countries. To show how things could be done differently I incorporated an article on the position in Denmark, Finland and Norway in my submission. The submission points to where reform is urgent in making 13 recommendations, all of which are eminently feasible. With every one of these proposals for improvement, we can learn lessons from at least one Nordic country and usually from several of them.

I wish to highlight four proposals for reform which relate to the shape of the overall prison system and, in particular, the way we plan the prison estate. We could and should plan for a reduction of at least one third in the prison population. This would merely bring Ireland closer to the rate of incarceration it consistently had up to the mid-1990s, or near to rates in Nordic countries today. We should have at least one third of that reduced population in open prisons, as is the case in Denmark, Finland and Norway. Ireland has only 5% of the prison population in open prisons such as Loughan House and Shelton Abbey.

There is another side to the coin in reducing the prison population. We should think in terms of having two thirds of all sentences served in the community rather than in prison; the rate currently stands at only about 30% in Ireland, but it is 67% in Sweden and 68% in Denmark. We should have much smaller prisons, as is generally the case in Nordic countries. In Ireland we are clearly incapable of operating prisons with more than about 150 prisoners without resorting to extensive, very destructive and costly segregation measures. Every one of the nine largest prisons, including Arbour Hill Prison, has severe segregation measures and it seems these systems do not work.

Looking more closely at regimes, by which I mean the way people in prison are treated and the conditions in which they are held, I would mention five serious deficiencies as I see them. First, 60% of those in prison in Ireland share cells, in contravention of the European prison rules. Second, as a consequence of that, most prisoners must go to the toilet in the presence of others. I cannot put it any more delicately than that. Third, lock-up time is excessive for the great majority in prison. "Excessive" is the word the Whitaker report used about lock-up times in 1985 and matters have worsened rather than improved since then. Fourth, an utterly inadequate gratuity paid to prisoners is due to be cut by an average of 28%. Fifth, access to structured activities has been greatly reduced in prisons in recent years due to a variety of factors. I will give just one example. Up to 2008, 125 or more long-term prisoners were involved in third level study each year, mostly through the Open University across the prison system but also through an NCAD course in Portlaoise. Today, that has been reduced greatly, to approximately one third of the previous level. I would be happy to elaborate on any of those points or on any matters in my submission.

Fr. Peter McVerry:

I thank members for the opportunity to address them. I visit the prisons on a regular basis. I spend most of my weekends in the prisons and I spend my time meeting prisoners, so that is the perspective I am coming from. I would have no hesitation in saying that from that perspective, our present prison system is a total disaster.

The mission statement of the Irish Prison Service is to provide safe and secure custody, dignity of care and rehabilitation to prisoners for safer communities. The only word in that which is actually appropriate is "secure". Our prisons are not safe. There is very little dignity of care and there is very little rehabilitation for the majority of prisoners. I refer to something in the report by the Inspector of Prisons on St. Patrick's Institution which is very instructive about the attitude towards prisoners. He said he found that the prisoners there, who were not allowed to wear their own clothes, were wearing prison clothes which were ill-fitting, torn, had holes in them and were dirty. To give prisoners clothes like that is a symptom of the attitude that exists towards prisoners - they are of no value. There is no respect for the prisoners and the majority of prisoners feel that. Even though there are some wonderful prison officers who really care and who try very hard, the system itself communicates a total lack of respect and care for prisoners.

The most fundamental problem in the prisons is overcrowding. Until that is addressed, it is extremely difficult to deal with the other serious issues such as rehabilitation, drug misuse and violence in our prisons. For example, when Wheatfield Prison opened in 1989, it was a model prison. It had 320 cells for 320 prisoners and it had constructive activity for almost all of those 320 prisoners. Then it started putting bunk beds into the cells. Most cells in Wheatfield are double now. The number of prisoners rose to 500. A new extension was opened and the number rose to more than 700, but not one single extra classroom or workshop was built. That is a symptom of the way the prison system has been going. We could now describe the prison system as a warehousing of prisoners. As long as the problem of overcrowding exists, it is difficult to deal with other problems.

The Irish Prison Service has repeatedly stated that it does not have control over the number of people going into prison. I accept that, but it does have control over the number of people coming out of prison. One thing we could do immediately, which was recommended by the Whitaker committee in 1985, is to introduce one third remission. I would go further, but politically that may not be possible. One third remission for good behaviour would immediately free up a considerable number of spaces. It is not a hugely radical proposal. In the UK, which is hardly a model of good penal policy for us, there is 50% remission, but during that 50% remission time one is under the supervision of a probation officer and can be recalled to prison if the supervision breaks down.

Approximately 80% of the people going into our prisons have an addiction problem and for many of them, that is the reason they are there. One way to ensure people do not go to prison is to deal with their addiction problems in the community. There are various ways to do that. The drug court is a small example but it is very limited. Nevertheless, if addiction facilities within the community are better, fewer people will eventually have to go to prison. Within the prison system itself, there are nine detox beds for 4,500 prisoners, most of whom have an addiction problem. There are very few drug-free spaces in our prisons for those who are drug free. I personally know about 40 people - the number grows every month - who never touched a drug before they went into prison but came out addicted to heroin. They may be sharing a cell with a heroin user or they may be living within a drugs culture. The boredom and monotony of prison life, because there is very little for most prisoners to do, drives people to using drugs just to escape from that boredom.

There is a proposal - the Irish Prison Service may be thinking about this - that the medical unit in Mountjoy Prison, which is capable of accommodating maybe 50 to 60 prisoners, should be designated as a drug detox centre. When people have completed their drug detox, the training unit would be one option. They would move to an intensive rehabilitation programme in the training unit and from there they would be released on a phased basis, perhaps into day treatment programmes in the community. If we could deal effectively with the addiction problems of people going into prison, we would reduce the numbers going into prison enormously.

In regard to rehabilitation, there are excellent school and training facilities in most of our prisons but they are available only to a tiny proportion of prisoners at any one time. The profile of prisoners is well documented. They have low levels of literacy, are early school leavers, have few qualifications or skills, have a poor employment history and sometimes have a history of homelessness or mental health issues. We have an opportunity in prison, particularly for those serving longer sentences of 12 months or more, to try to address some of those deficiencies, but for the majority of prisoners it just does not happen, as they do not have access. They may have access to the school one morning per week and they may have access to a training programme one morning a week. The statistics we get from the Irish Prison Service are hopelessly unreliable. It will talk about 58% of prisoners attending school. That could mean attending school one morning per week but being idle and bored the rest of the time. It will talk about a certain number of prisoners attending a particular workshop, but if one goes to the workshop one finds that only a quarter of the prisoners who are supposed to be attending are actually there because it does not have the required number of staff due to the embargo on recruitment. Rehabilitation in an overcrowded prison becomes virtually impossible.

Integrated sentence management is the best thing I have heard of but, in reality and despite all the hype, it is not happening. The Irish Prison Service will attack me on that but, basically, it is not happening. If it is, it is happening for a tiny number of people. It has huge potential but it is not happening.

Putting people into 23 hour lock-up, as a huge number are, to keep them safe is inhumane.

If one locked a dog in a cell for 23 hours a day, one would be reported to the ISCPA. It is just inhumane. I know prisoners who spent three or four years on 23 hour lock-up and were psychologically and emotionally disturbed when they came out of prison. It can only be damaging to a person. We cannot deal with the problem of violence until we deal with the overcrowding issue. Therefore, we are condemned to putting people into prison cells for 23 hours. The prison system is a disaster. A root and branch reform of attitudes, policies and procedures is needed.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Does Mr. Carroll want to add anything to that?

Mr. Eoin Carroll:

I do not want to take advantage of the time afforded to us. I understand that when members of the sub-committee travel to Finland, they will have an opportunity to meet Mr. Tapio Lappi-Seppälä who made a presentation at our conference last month. The achievement of political consensus is a central part of his thesis on how the prison population can be reduced. There can be no political consensus in the absence of a culture of acceptance that this is a real issue. Perhaps this committee might examine how best to foster a culture in which political consensus can be achieved. The recent report on St. Patrick's Institution highlighted cultural issues on the ground, at the highest management levels of the Irish Prison Service and perhaps within the Department. Mr. Lappi-Seppälä emphasises that the reaching of political consensus has been of great importance in Finland. The Minister has asked a new working group to review penal policy. While that is to be welcomed, I am concerned that the group will not have sufficient time - it is due to report back by mid-2013 - and that its composition suggests it is heavily laden with departmental appointees, especially by comparison with the group established on foot of the Whitaker report.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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We will produce our own report. That might prove useful also.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

I would like to make three specific recommendations. They are all underpinned by the need to reduce the prison population without putting the public at risk, whether in terms of the extra burden of victimisation or additional costs. Before I outline my recommendations, I would like to make the observation that discussions about crime and punishment tend to have a circular feel to them. When I was compiling my submission, I was reminded that an Oireachtas sub-committee on crime and punishment had met and reported 12 years ago. Some of the observations made by that sub-committee are worth repeating. It is striking that despite the sub-committee's recommendations and the recommendations made by all committees in the last 30 years, the prison population is continuing to increase and the same kinds of recommendations are being restated. It is probably fair to say there is a reasonable degree of consensus about what needs to be done, which is to reserve prison for the most serious offenders or those who pose the greatest threat, to minimise the harm that incarceration poses to such persons and their families and to deal with as many people as possible in the community. The problem seems to be to obliterate the blocks in the way of progress.

It is worth running through a couple of the recommendations made by the previous sub-committee 12 years ago. There was consensus that greater recourse to imprisonment was not the only way in which the problem of crime could be addressed. That consensus continues.

There was a real concern about fine defaulters going to prison. It was suggested there should be a more effective and efficient way of imposing financial sanctions, recovering the moneys involved and reducing the burden on the courts and the prisons. Approximately 1,300 fine defaulters were committed to prison in 2007. That figure had increased to approximately 7,500 by last year. It accounted for almost half of the total number of committals, which is a huge problem. It was very pressing 12 years ago and is even more pressing today.

The idea that the number of prison places is in some way related to the crime rate was challenged vigorously by the sub-committee which drew the conclusion that the size of the prison population was, to some extent, a political calculation that lay within the power of our legislators. It is much more difficult to change the rate of crime. We need to recognise that these two things need to be separate. When that lesson was learned in Finland, it had a dramatic impact on that country's penal policy.

The sub-committee also recommended that statistical models be used to help us to understand how many prison places were required. Such models would require a detailed understanding of sentencing practice. There is a huge informational vacuum in that regard. Interestingly, the sub-committee noted that as Ireland was then in the happy position of lagging behind other European countries, we had the fortune to be able to design a system that prevented some of the unintended harmful consequences of penal expansionism. However, we did not seize that opportunity. The prison population has increased substantially since the sub-committee reported 12 years ago.

I have identified three areas where swift and effective action is possible. I will run through them briefly and we can elaborate on them in our discussions.

First, we should support temporary release on humanitarian grounds or for vocational training purposes, which used to be part of the prison system, particularly around Christmas time when there was a willingness to allow prisoners to go home. They almost always came back on time and if they did not, they generally returned shortly afterwards. It was uncontroversial and attracted very little adverse media comment. There were some years in the mid-1990s when almost one in five prisoners was given temporary release at Christmas. Last year one in 25 prisoners was given temporary release for Christmas. There has been a substantial change in this area. The issue could be addressed quickly. Clearly, there are more prisoners on remand than there were in the past. Such prisoners are ineligible for temporary release. In addition, there are more prisoners from overseas who might not have the community contacts that allow temporary release to take place. The decreased prevalence of temporary release might be an indication of a punitive shift in the criminal justice system. Temporary release is important because it is effective. When the UCD institute of criminology followed up on 20,000 prisoner releases, it found that those who were granted occasional temporary release for vocational or family purposes were significantly less likely to be reimprisoned. That held true up to four years after they were eventually released. That is a clear empirical demonstration of the benefits of showing trust in people and allowing them to repay that trust with good behaviour. Therefore, my first recommendation is that we should return to the situation where there was an openness to allowing this kind of temporary release in a structured and tailored way, rather than as a safety valve to ease overcrowding.

The second recommendation I would like to make relates to parole. There has been very little change in the parole making process for approximately half a century. The Minister for Justice and Equality makes a determination on the issue of release in every single case, having received a recommendation from the Parole Board. The process is secretive and has not been scrutinised in the way it has been in other jurisdictions. It is encouraging that the new chairman is open to this kind of dialogue and open to reform. The reality is that life sentence prisoners who are released on licence today will have spent a decade longer in custody than their counterparts in the early 1980s. The average time before release now is over 17 years. In the 1980s, it was seven years. In almost every case the prisoner in question is someone who has committed murder. It is not as if murders have become much more dangerous in the intervening period. There has been a reluctance to grant parole until people have served huge quantities of time that would have been difficult to imagine 25 or 30 years ago. The parole window could be widened without delay. I know Mr. Costello indicated that there would be cost implications if this were done. In Finland parole is possible after 14 days. In Ireland the earliest possible review is after 1,460 days, the halfway point of an eight year sentence. Why not make parole a possibility for anyone serving four years or more? It is clear that cost implications would arise in the context of the review process, but significant savings could be made in terms of prison time. Last year imprisonment cost €65,000 per prisoner per year. If we open the parole window a little wider, we will have the scope to reduce the prison population in a structured and substantial way. There would be cost savings in that regard.

My final recommendation relates to enhanced remission. It has been mentioned that one third remission, as opposed to the standard one quarter, is possible under the prison rules for prisoners who take part in treatment programmes. The potential of that facility to reduce the prison population has not been exploited. If it were, it would incentivise prisoners to take part in programmes, reduce the threat they pose, reduce overcrowding, usher in a more structured approach to release and save money. It is fair to say politicians in Ireland have often shown restraint that is not evident among politicians elsewhere in the Anglophone world, which is to be welcomed. The debates about penal policy in England, Australia, New Zealand and the United States tend to be much more polarised and punitive. Anything that will allow our context to continue is positive.

The Chairman said at the outset that if we could make some suggestions as to where inquiries could be directed in Finland that would be welcome. I would like to propose two suggestions and then I will finish. What is the sense over there as to the optimum size of a prison? We have had discussions about prison building in recent years which have anticipated gargantuan developments in our scale. What would be considered in Finland or Scandinavia as the optimum prison size, it is for 100, 200 or 300 prisoners. The second point is the Finnish example where we can learn something from them about judicial training. The prison population is driven to a large extent by the behaviour of judges - that is something about which we know very little. There are European Union ways of going about judicial training and it would be very helpful to have a sense of those.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I thank Professor O'Donnell.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

I thank the committee for the invitation to appear before it. If some of what I have to say sounds as if I come from a parallel universe I should show the committee that apart from having written about crime I have also been involved with the Cork auto crime diversion project for about ten years, which is unique, in that it closed not due to a lack of money but because it ran out of car thieves to deal with. If one can buy a company car in Cork, that has failed the national car test, for €20, why does one need to rob one?

I have experience in the field. I am slightly older than Professor Ian O'Donnell. While he can remember reports from 12 to 14 years ago, I can go back 32 years. The first one which came to my notice was a group chaired by Seán MacBride, set up by the Prisoners Rights Organisation, of which the Minister of State, Deputy Joe Costello was a member. It was treated by the Department of Justice and Equality at the time as if it was a group of subversives, though among the subversivies on the committee was Michael D. Higgins and Mary McAleese. From the first five years in 1985, there was a report every year about the prison system and the juvenile justice system. That can be followed up in all the subsequent years. Every two or three years there was a report that laid out the problems and suggested what should be done and we end up with the kind of prison system described by Fr. Peter McVerry. What all the reports share in common is that they advocate a reduction in the prison population and most see alternatives to custody as the means of achieving the reduction.

The second and most significant issue is that they have all largely been ignored and have all failed to have a significant impact on how the penal system operates. Why has there been such a level of failure to act on the issue of prison reform? It appears to me that the committee has to address the question of what it can do that other groups failed to do. The issue is not a shortage of ideas or a shortage of information. There is much information around how to reform prison systems. The issue could well be a lack of political will, a fear of talk show fascism, or a culture of denial among the Department of Justice and Equality about the extent of the problems of the prison and whether prisons actually need to be reformed. In 2006, Fr. Peter McVerry said that St. Patrick's Institution damaged inmates and their conditions had regressed over the previous 21 years. He said that some prison officers "should be immediately dismissed" as they did immense damage to the young people. The director of the Irish Prison Service said that the report was out of date, at best, and, at worst, inaccurate. He rejects its findings. After what we saw last week, which of them is right? Those aspects need to be addressed.

It is not that things have not happened. A plethora of projects has been set up all over the country with the stated aims of diverting from prison, reducing offending and tackling drug use. Many of these projects have been set up as a way to put a claim on community resources and also not to deprive communities. Only a few of them have been systematically evaluated in terms of their effect on offending. What they are part of is what criminologists call bifurcation. They talk about the way in which alternatives to prison grow at the same time as the size of the prison population increases. One of the ways in which this can be explained is that if one adds non-custodial alternatives to the current pool of non-custodial alternatives what happens is that they become interchangeable. Dr. Paul O'Mahony, for example, has argued that one of the things about restorative justice is that it is not being used instead of prison, but instead of some other sanction, a fine, a caution, or whatever. What happens in many of the projects with which I have had contact is that over time they find themselves working with soft-end offenders, offenders with whom it is easier to work and the long-term persistent petty criminals tend not be the people who end up in these projects. If there are alternatives to custody the key question in evaluating their success is whether the prison population falls. Prison does not work and these projects do not work immediately but have a much longer term effect.

A third issue addressed in the submission is the question of cost. It has been argued that alternatives to prison or part of their appeal is that they are cheaper than prison. There is an argument that is not the case. The traditional figure used for the cost of prison is the average cost of prison but the marginal cost of putting another prisoner in prison is quite low. For example, we can double the number of people in prison without having to increase the number of beds. That does not cost any more to get the same number of people in there. The other issue about alternatives to custody is the way in which they are funded, the way in which they are put at arm's length by the Department of Justice and Equality. In other words it will give money to local projects but they are run through voluntary committees. They get people with a huge level of commitment but they raise the usual questions of who in the community gets involved and they seldom have very few young people on them. The staff in these projects have no career structure or career progression and do not have the career security that is necessary for the work they do. The level of commitment given by these people to working with offenders is admirable but the level of staff burnout and staff turnover is very high. If we want people to work with hard end offenders they must be rewarded appropriately.

The final issue I raised is the wider question of how prison systems change. I suggest that at least three factors are important. One way in which prisons change is when the prisoners themselves revolt against prison conditions and then something has to be done. The Attica prison riot is probably the most famous example. The second is when the courts start to imprison middle class offenders, a factor of some significance in the development of open prison and other alternatives in the US. This is unlikely here because the call for the use of prison for the corporate criminal is as old as the call for the reform of the prison system and is equally ineffective. There may be a few tokenistic presentations but do not expect a significant increase in the number of prisoners who come to Mountjoy from Dublin 4 addresses and have to be resettled in Dublin 4 when they emerge from prison. The third factor is an important one. Prison reform in other jurisdictions happened when a country's judiciary has ordered the closure of prisons as a result of human rights abuses, overcrowding and ineffectiveness. In many cases it has little impact on crime levels but when judges closed prisons it forced people to think imaginatively and urgently about what should be done. The Massachusetts juvenile justice system still remains very important here. It is also a fact that the decline in crime in New York, which is one of the most significant declines in the contemporary penal criminology area, was accompanied by a decline in incarceration because what it came up with is more imaginative alternatives to prison.

It is in that context I suggest that the committee could call for the immediate closure of Mountjoy Prison. One could be liberal about it and give them a year in which to do it. If Mountjoy was a hospital and had the same record of failure to cure people, where patients left with more illnesses than they had going in, it would have been closed long ago. The promise or the threat of closure would concentrate minds and lead to creative thinking about how to deal with offending behaviour.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I thank Dr. McCullagh.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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I thank the delegates for taking the time to appear before the committee to give us the benefit of their experience and expertise in this area. We appreciate it. The submissions and notes provided to the committee are helpful and stimulating. The presentations were substantial and challenging.

All of us on the sub-committee share the frustration of the witnesses at the number and extent of reports carried out in the past on the penal system. Professor Ian O'Donnell referred to the previous justice committee report 12 years ago gathering dust.

We are all anxious to ensure the report we produce at the end of this year will not be another of these reports - I am aware everyone says this when producing a report - but it seemed to us when we set up this sub-committee that there was a window of opportunity at this time. I am the rapporteur for the sub-committee and having been involved in penal reform for years, I see an opportunity now with the new Minister, who has announced the establishment of a penal policy working group and has shown more of an interest in penal reform than has been evident for some time. Also, there is a change of regime within the Irish Prison Service and the Department of Justice.

We were all very depressed by the findings of the report on St. Patrick's Institution. We went into that institution some months ago with the Chair of the committee and saw a very sanitised version of the prison and the detention centre. I understand the Minister, Deputy Shatter, said the same thing and that when he visited he did not understand the extent of the immense abuse going on. However, action will be taken on foot of the report and perhaps this committee will invite the Minister in to ask what specifically is being done to address the problems in St. Patrick's Institution. We are very pleased that the detention of minors there is being phased out, but clearly more needs to be done.

With regard to the report on St. Patrick's Institution, this sub-committee was set up in light of the Thornton Hall review group report, which highlighted the issue of back door strategies to try and reduce the reliance on imprisonment and address problems of recidivism by looking at how we deal with end of sentence management. There has been significant work done on sentencing and the need to ensure greater reliance on community sanction and reserve imprisonment as a last resort. However, statutory reform has been very slow in terms of implementing the Fines Act. This committee is looking specifically at what happens at the end of a sentence. This work is assisted by the work done already in the Irish Penal Reform Trust's excellent report, which was published on Monday, on reform of remission, temporary release and parole and this will inform what we do. Therefore, we are very grateful these issues are addressed in all of the submissions.

I have a few specific questions for the witnesses on their views and recommendations with regard to what we should be looking at. Professor O'Donnell referred to an optimum prison size. What is the optimum prison size and is there a cap above which prisons should not go? With regard to optimum rules on remission, the Irish Penal Reform Trust has recommended a standard remission rate of 50% should be introduced for those serving sentences of less than five years and that enhanced remission of 50% should be possible, on an earned basis, for those serving sentences of over five years. I am aware the witnesses today have put forward different suggestions on remission. Dr. Warner said that 30% or one third was standard and 50% for young offenders. What is the optimum remission in an ideal world?

What can be done through statutory reform? We heard previously that the work being done on the community return programme is being done on foot of current legislation and there was disagreement among those who came before us as to whether statutory reform was needed if we were to recommend putting community return on a more formal footing. Fr. McVerry referred to integrated sentence management, of which we have heard glowing reports from the Irish Prison Service. However, Fr. McVerry said it was not working. How can we achieve the potential of that programme and other good initiatives such as community return? The community return programme is only a pilot programme currently and there appears to be some disagreement as to whether integrated sentence management is being rolled out.

With regard to people who are just released from prison, how can we ensure practical supports are in place? Does this require legislation or do we simply need to reform the social welfare provisions to ensure people have access to accommodation, medical cards and cash on their release? I thank Dr. Warner for the Finnish and Swedish examples he has given us, which are very helpful. We have taken his recommendation on board for our visit to Finland.

Dr. Kevin Warner:

I will respond on the question regarding size. This is a good question, because the size of a prison population is ultimately a political decision and not something that happens as a result of external factors. Countries can decide how many people they will imprison and work to that. I am glad the committee has made a decision to visit Finland, where it is government policy to reduce the prison population. Finland has been doing this systematically. After the Second World War, its prison population was very high and it has been reducing it since. First it reduced it to other Nordic levels, but has now reduced it well below these.

It is a question of political realism, as Professor O'Donnell said. In September 1995, we had 2,054 people in prison, almost the same as in the previous September. Perhaps it would be better to look at this in terms of the rate of incarceration per 100,000 of the population, because the overall population has changed over the years. The rate has fluctuated from 98 to 100 in recent times. For many years up to 1995 our rate of incarceration was always below 62. Therefore, going from 62 to 98 is more than a 50% increase. When I suggested we cut by one third, I was simply suggesting we reverse that increase so that we reduce numbers to approximately 3,000.

There are all sorts of considerations to be taken into account, such as the rate at which we imprison people, how long we imprison them for and how quickly we release prisoners. The largely forgotten Whitaker report does not state it explicitly, but if we relate what it discusses to the population of the country at the time, it refers to a rate of incarceration of 50. We might say the country has changed greatly since then, but it has not changed greatly since 1995. The level of crime has not changed either. As Professor O'Donnell would probably tell us, it has dropped since then. Therefore, we could certainly look to go well below a prison population of 3,000.

A question was also asked about remission. My submission went back to the Whitaker report, which suggested one third rather than one quarter remission in general, as suggested by others here. However, they suggest 50% remission for juveniles. This week, the Irish Penal Reform Trust spoke about 50% remission for anyone serving a sentence of under five years. These are all good ideas. The Whitaker report also suggested measures we see taken in Denmark, such as releasing people earlier under supervision and on certain conditions, perhaps drug treatment, education or work. We need a whole range of initiatives.

Fr. Peter McVerry:

With regard to the ideal size for a prison, the smaller the better. I suggest a size to cater for 150 prisoners, with a maximum of 200. We are building larger prisons currently. Wheatfield is approaching a prison population of 1,000. Currently it has 700, but one unit is to be doubled up and that will bring the population there to almost 900. The Midlands Prison, if it has not already reached it, is approaching a population of 1,000. The population of Mountjoy will be back up to 700 when it is refurbished. Therefore, we are moving in the direction of bigger prisons all the time.

What happens within the prisons is important. The sub-committee has visited Wheatfield, which was built on the basis of the best physical model available in Europe at the time.

The unit the committee visited was meant to be self-contained. Prisoners were supposed to be out of their cells from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. This is what happens in the same physical units in other countries. They were meant to cook their meals communally in the unit. They had access to the outside through a door in the unit and a sensor would indicate if they moved beyond the area where they were supposed to be recreating. They had freedom all day long within the confines of the unit. We built it according to the best model that was available in Europe but we imposed the Mountjoy regime onto it, which destroyed it.

The United Kingdom has a 50% remission rate and it is not especially enlightened in terms of prison policy. I do not understand why we cannot go that far although politically it might be a problem. There would be a great outcry but I would favour a move towards it.

The problem with integrated sentence management is that in order to be effective it would require a vast increase in resources. The idea of integrated sentence management is that the needs of every prisoner going in would be assessed by a multidisciplinary team within the first couple of weeks. Then a plan would be drawn up with the prisoner to address those needs. One would need a vast increase in training, education and other resources to effectively introduce integrated sentence management on a wide scale. The problem at the moment is that many prisoners are keen to do something constructive but they cannot because the facilitates are not in place or they do not have access to them. The idea of an enhanced regime whereby someone will get extra benefits if they participate in rehabilitation programmes is blindness to my mind because the programmes in which people wish to participate simply are not there.

There should be better co-ordination for people leaving prison. I received a telephone call this morning from a man who had been released last night at 5 p.m. but he had nowhere to go. He slept on the street last night. He wanted to know whether he could meet me this morning to sort something out. He has no money, nowhere to go and he cannot get welfare. Unstructured, early temporary release is a total disaster. People are being told to pack their gear and that they will be out in two hours. This person said to me that he should have insisted he would not go because he came out to nothing. It simply needs co-ordination. There is a good service. Two community welfare officers go into prisons to deal with homeless people. They arrange accommodation and a welfare cheque at the gate for when they are released but this requires planned release. Unstructured temporary release falls flat on its face for the majority of prisoners. They come out of prison into homelessness with no money and no access to money perhaps for several weeks because the welfare system takes that long to process a claim. How can we be surprised that the recidivism rate is so high?

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

I wish to echo the points made but I will also make a specific recommendation when it comes to the scale of the prison population. I also wish to say something about the scale of individual institutions. Dr. Warner remarked how the prison population in Ireland used to be low, even in relatively recent times. The world prison population list was published initially by the Home Office in London. It was first published in 1999. We measure the rate of imprisonment because the population is increasing a good deal. Our rate of imprisonment in that list was approximately 65 per 100,000. The EU 15 average was approximately 85 per 100,000. This meant we were 20 percentage points below average. The latest edition of that list came out last year. The average was approximately 100 per 100,000 and we sit on that average position now.

Senator Bacik asked how could we produce a report that will not simply gather dust. One way would be to have something specified with sufficient precision such that when it is returned to in several years, people will say that it either has had the desired effect or otherwise. What might that be? We might return to a situation whereby we are 20 points below the European average within a specified timeframe. Much of the increase in imprisonment has been during the past five years. It would not be outrageous to suggest that we pull our rate of imprisonment back down to 20 points below the European norm in the coming five years. That represents a quantifiable, measurable target and a reasonable period to get there. The increase took approximately five years and it has been somewhat uncontrolled; it seems reasonable to redress the increase in the same period.

A question was asked about optimum prison size. From the literature with which I am familiar my sense is that the optimum is somewhat higher than the suggestion of my colleagues, approximately the 300 mark, but certainty a good way below the prison populations in this country at the moment. Specific points were made about remission, prisoner reintegration and structuring a sentence such that the planning for release beings on the first day of a period of imprisonment. The issue of prisoner reintegration was something the National Economic and Social Forum devoted a full report to some ten years ago. The report made several useful recommendations and there may be some merit in re-examining them. Although it has not been used, given that is possible under prison rules at the moment, a remission rates of one third would be a good place to start. If the rate of remission were increased above that level there is a possibility of a knock-on effect in terms of the sentences imposed. Why not start with that measure? There would be fewer ripples of disquiet. We can do it so why not proceed and see what happens?

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

I will take up that point. Currently, prisons have maximum numbers. The design capacity of Cork Prison is 170 or 180 but on average there are 300 there. One can specify the maximum size of a prison but how does one stop more and more people being put in? It is fine to say that a prison can only take 300 people but in Ireland such a prison will have 500 in it within a coupe of years. There are design capacities and maximum numbers stated for all the prisons but they are never enforced. When there is a shortage of space they double, treble or quadruple up and we must stop that happening. There cannot be rehabilitative programmes in a system that works in this way.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Father McVerry said that if we did some work on remission there would be an outcry. Can he expand on that and explain where it would come from?

Fr. Peter McVerry:

It would come from the press. The report of the Irish Penal Reform Trust was severely criticised in some of the press. There was reference to letting out murderers and sex offenders early. There is a hostile attitude towards offenders generally within the population and certainly within some of the media. There is bound to be media opposition to any such measures if they are too dramatic. However, it might be different if they were introduced gradually. Professor O'Donnell noted that there is provision for one third remission in the prison rules already and that could take place without anyone noticing. That is the way to go. If one announced it, there would be a backlash from the tabloid media and from many sectors of the population. This might make it politically difficult to implement.

Mr. John Costello:

I met prisoners in Arbour Hill. Lifers and sex offenders were strongly of the view that there should be enhanced remission. The prisoners undertaking the Building Better Lives programme were frustrated that they received the same remission as prisoners that did not get off their backsides to do anything. They were strongly of the view that there should be enhanced remission. That could represent a compromise. There could be enhanced remission above the 25% automatic remission and I would be in favour of it.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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I was struck by that comment in the submission that such prisoners felt badly treated if people got out with the same level of remission and that they had participated in programmes while others had not. Mr. Costello said that 30% of prisoners declined to be reviewed by the Parole Board. Why is that?

Mr. John Costello:

That was mainly life sentence prisoners, virtually all of whom participate. Let us suppose one is serving a fixed sentence for eight years. One gets 25% remission and gets out after six years. We can only review such cases after four years. In practice, because of delays in our system, we were only reviewing such cases after five years instead of four years. The prisoners were wasting their time because they were going to get out a few months later in any event. That was happening in many cases.

We are working to reduce those delays into the future.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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Will Mr. Costello comment on the argument put forward by the Irish Penal Reform Trust that legal representation should be available to all prisoners appearing before the Parole Board, in accordance with international jurisprudence norms?

Mr. John Costello:

My understanding is that such representation is not required in every instance. In the case of life sentence prisoners, for example, their case is reviewed after seven years. This involves an interview by two members of the board who then submit a written report to the board. In addition, we receive reports on the prisoner from the psychology services, probation and welfare service and so on. The position heretofore is that previous Ministers for Justice have indicated an unwillingness to release any life sentence prisoners until they have served a minimum of 15 years. We have just received the agreement of the current Minister, Deputy Alan Shatter, that a life prisoner can be released after 12 years. The case remains, however, that no such prisoner will not be released following the seven-year review and the provision of independent legal advice to the prisoner will not change that position. One could argue that such advice might be useful in the case of a fourth or fifth review, after the person has been incarcerated for 12 to 16 years. In the case of the first or second review of a life sentence prisoner, however, there is no chance of parole being granted and, as such, legal representation would not add any value to the process.

Mr. Eoin Carroll:

I wish to make two quick points. First, the development of prison campuses is, in my view, a regressive step. Second, Senator Ivana Bacik referred to the community return programme. Although this seems excellent on paper, there are issues to flag. As Dr. McCullagh pointed out, there is a risk of net widening, with prisoners on temporary release being assigned a high level of supervision which is not necessarily required. There is also the concept of low-lying fruit, that is, the tendency to select those prisoners most likely to succeed in the programme rather than the more challenging candidates. As I recall, the Minister indicated at the launch of the scheme that there would be no risk to society in it. In reality, nobody can guarantee there will be no risk, but we must be prepared to take chances.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

It strikes me that penal policy is a very odd aspect of Government policy in general, being one of the few aspects of policy where public opposition is sufficient to prevent certain proposals being implemented. One does not find the same effect when it comes to opposition to the imposition of a universal social charge or increases in income tax or VAT, for example, as compared with opposition to a scheme of early prisoner release. The argument is made that there is a broader interest than merely public opposition. In other words, it is justified in terms of some overarching principle that is wider than the immediate concerns of the readership of the Daily Mail or whatever. There must be a more far-sighted approach to the formulation of penal policy. Why should those people who call Joe Duffy to voice their opposition to a particular measure have the power to make politicians run away from taking that action?

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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We would surely have an outbreak of talk show fascism if radical proposals were made in this area.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

Should fascism not be resisted?

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I should certainly hope so.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

There is a historical pedigree there.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Absolutely.

Martin Conway (Fine Gael)
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This is has been a most enlightening discussion. I certainly support the concept of 50% remission as a step towards resolving the problems facing the penal system. However, I agree that there might well be a high degree of public resistance to such proposals which would, in turn, manifest itself in a significant degree of opposition in the Oireachtas. A solution might be found by introducing some type of restorative justice process whereby perpetrators could hear at first hand about the effect of their crimes on the victims. Giving a stronger voice to victims and obliging criminals to face up to the realities of their crimes might make any proposal for 50% remission more palatable to the public. What are the delegates' views on restorative justice in general? The problem this committee is facing is that very little has come of previous proposals for significant reform, with report after report left to gather dust on the shelf. I hope we are not wasting our time here and that our deliberations will be taken on board.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

I take the Senator's point about reports being shelved. It is several years since the National Commission on Restorative Justice made recommendations regarding the mainstreaming of these types of practices.

Martin Conway (Fine Gael)
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What is Professor O'Donnell's view on restorative justice?

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

My view is that it has a role to play at every point in the system, particularly in terms of diverting people away from the criminal process as well as addressing some of the issues that come up during the term of a prison sentence. There seems to be an appetite for it nationally. When members of the National Crime Forum went around the country in the late 1990s trying to get a sense of the public mood on crime and punishment, the issue of restorative justice came up again and again. There was a real sense, particularly among communities beleaguered by crime, that prison was not the only or whole solution. People certainly wanted respite from criminality, including anti-social behaviour, but there was a view that restorative justice might be one element of a package of measures to assist communities to deal with the problems confronting them.

The National Crime Forum was an exercise in ascertaining the public mood and on foot of its report, the National Crime Council was established. This, however, was one of the few so-called quangos to be abolished some years ago. The crime council is gone, the report of the crime forum is long forgotten, but the issue of restorative justice came up for discussion once again with the establishment of the National Commission on Restorative Justice. It is an issue that certainly is worthy of debate. In my view, it might be more relevant in terms of keeping people out of custody and diverting them from crime rather than at the reintegration stage, when they have already served a sentence.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Fr. McVerry indicated that some 80% of prisoners have drug addiction problems. The rise in drug use in society generally seems to be paralleled in increased rates of criminality and incarceration. In recent years we have seen the proliferation of many different types of drugs, both legal and illegal. We had a very good debate on this issue in the Dáil recently. I am concerned that we are attempting to treat drug addiction and misuse in silos - education, health and so on - without any overarching approach. Will Fr. McVerry comment on the impact of increased drug misuse on criminality, incarceration, penal policy and so on?

Fr. Peter McVerry:

When we talk about addiction, we must include alcohol as one of the substances which may potentially drive people towards crime. I understand that 80% of all monetary crime is related to drugs, that is, the perpetrators engage in crime in order to acquire the money to purchase drugs. There has been a huge increase in drug misuse in recent years. Moreover, we are seeing new drugs with increasingly psychotic effects and drugs which arouse aggression and violence in those who consume them. A user told me the other day that crystal meth is the new drug on the block and that coming down from it causes a depression like nothing he had experienced before. When he is coming down, he said, he would kill his granny to get another fix.

In my experience, many prisoners would love to deal constructively with their drug problem but do not, unfortunately, have the opportunity to do so. I am involved in a small project where, with the consent of the relevant judges, I bring people from Cloverhill Prison down to the drug treatment centre in Athy run by Sr. Consilio. I have accompanied approximately 120 prisoners there in recent years.

I get a huge number of requests from people in Cloverhill Prison and in other prisons at they approach the end of their sentence asking if I could get them a place on a drug treatment programme as they do not wish to be released back on to the streets to fall into the same pattern of drug misuse. I believe there is a real appetite among drug users to deal with their problem. One of the triggers that brings that about is the possibility of a prison sentence looming over them. If we expanded the opportunities for drug treatment within the community, I believe that considerably fewer people would go to prison.

In terms of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977 - this is interesting because drugs were not a problem here in 1977 - a far-sighted civil servant proposed that an alterative to imprisonment would be a custodial drug treatment centre. Instead of people being handed down a sentence, they would be sent to a custodial drug treatment centre and would still be locked up but in that centre they could deal with their addiction and provided they dealt with it, successfully completed the programme and presumably were under the supervision of a probation officer afterwards, they would not receive a prison sentence. We do not have a custodial drug treatment centre in this country more than 30 years later. That provision has real potential for reducing the prison population.

I was on the Whitaker commission and went to visit some of the prisons in Sweden and one of the ways the Swedes address prison overcrowding is by putting a limit on the number of people in prison. If one is sentenced to imprisonment there, one goes on a waiting list, a little like accessing hospital services here. That was one of the ways the Swedes addressed overcrowding in prisons. They also had a mandatory 30-day imprisonment for drink-driving. That meant many middle class people went to prison, which meant that prison conditions improved considerably. I am not advocating that but it is an interesting point.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

To return to the issue of restorative justice and the commitment there is to it and the fact that everyone is in favour of it, I understand the Nenagh project is the longest running restorative justice project in Ireland. It has been running from 1998 and it is still called a pilot project. When do they learn how to fly? When will these mainstreamed? If one thinks about the range of interventions at community level, they are always pilot projects. They do not seem to move on to the next stage whatever that is but they do not get to be mainstreamed. Restorative justice programmes, to some extent, may be in that grey area.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Dr. McCullagh mentioned the declining crime rate in New York. It was put to us previously that a factor in that was the impact of the community courts. Are the witnesses familiar with that approach, as it was pointed out they were very effective in New York?

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

There were very effective because they were immediate. It was a quick response and the issue was resolved quickly. That was a significant factor in that approach.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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A debate on this issue has begun in the UK under the auspices of the Prime Minister. Do the witnesses wish to comment on the direction it is taking or do they have any knowledge of that? No.

Katherine Zappone (Independent)
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I wish to make one of two comments. I feel very affected by the witnesses' presentations and they have really put it up to us. I have not been a member of this sub-committee or a public representative for very long. I would have sat where the witnesses are sitting and like them would have an extraordinary commitment, passion and academic rigour but would have still felt a little powerless to bring about change such as the change they seek. As I am sitting on this side I still have a sense of that powerlessness but on the other hand somebody has to have the power. That is the way I feel right now.

The witnesses have put it up to us. We could take all their more extended submissions, and what is emerging from this discussion, and order the recommendations in terms of which are the most important and what should happen first in all the categories. My colleague, Senator Ivana Bacik, not unlike the witnesses, has extraordinary expertise in this area. We could bring her expertise and the political expertise of my colleague, the Chairman, Deputy David Stanton, and the other members and we could probably get the best set of recommendations within a very strong theoretical framework. However, the question is would that bring about any change and that is really what the witnesses are saying to us.

I like Dr. McCullagh's suggestion about putting it up to us and that we call for the immediate closure of Mountjoy Prison. At the very least, we should be able to say why we might not be recommending that and the other things we believe we could recommend that would bring about some change. I am relatively new to this issue and perhaps that is not such a bad thing because I have not drilled down on this to the level all the witnesses have. I know what happens when I do that in other areas in which I have some expertise. I thank the witnesses for what they have said and they have really put it up to us.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Dr. McCullagh mentioned hard-end offenders and that work should be done there. He said they are more challenging and difficult and success can be harder and less immediate. Will he say a little more about that and give examples of what he means?

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

These would be persistent petty offenders who make up approximately 80% of the population of Mountjoy Prison. These are people who commit small offences on a recurring basis as distinct from a person who commits a public order offence once or twice. Public order offences were a great boom to community projects. The war on public order offences allowed people to deal with soft-end offenders because most public order offenders are not recidivists. They get caught, their mothers give out to them and they do not do it again.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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What is the rate of recidivism? What percentage re-offend?

Fr. Peter McVerry:

Some 50% of all those released from prison are back in prison within four years. The Department of Justice and Equality sees that as a sign that prison works in that the other half did not end up there, and that is a quote.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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The claim that we are doing well because the prison population has increased, that the more people there are in prison, the better we are doing in combating crime, is contradictory.

Fr. Peter McVerry:

We should keep an eye on Mountjoy Prison because in few years time it could be the model prison. All the wings are being refurbished and the present governor is committed to idea of one person one cell. Whether he will get away with that, I do not know but the C wing which has been refurbished is a wonderful place to have to spend one's sentence. If the other wings are refurbished and the policy remains one person one cell, it could be the model for all our other prisons.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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I was struck by Dr. McCullagh's suggestion because it is a radical and attractive one on one level but it is true. We had a longer visit in Mountjoy Prison and judging by the difference in its physical appearance and state of the place it has improved and it has scope for improvement. Many of us would be very wary of recommending its closure after what happened with Thornton Hall and that crazy plan to have a super prison that would replace Mountjoy. It is better to try to bed down reforms on the site in Mountjoy. The prison that should be closed is St. Patrick's institution. It has been recommended for closure so many times-----

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

Probably for 35 years, give or take.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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-----and it is something we should do here. The Care After Prison group put it up to us - to borrow a phrase Senator Zappone used in saying the witnesses have put it up to us - that because it is very hard to provide structured release programmes of any sort for people serving very short sentences, which they put at six months or less, that instead of considering remission and so on should we provide that people serving that length of sentence should be diverted altogether? There is an attractiveness to that because many of these people, to return to Dr. McCullagh's point on public order offences, are in prison for those offences. They pose a minimal risk if they have received a sentence of six months or less for a non-violent offence. There are examples from elsewhere of diversion in that sort of case, are there not? Are they effective?

Fr. Peter McVerry:

I think that in Spain all sentences of under two years are automatically suspended.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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Is that right? I knew there was some models of that elsewhere.

Dr. Ciarán McCullagh:

In that respect, that is going north, perhaps we should go south. Portugal is undergoing quite a radical restructuring of its criminal justice system in an attempt to reduce the size of its prison population and it shares one thing in common with us, it is also broke.

Dr. Kevin Warner:

I would like to revert to a couple of points that have been raised and hopefully point to practical lessons members might wish to take on board. On the drugs issue, there has been a huge effort in respect of resources, priority in policy and so forth in trying, not very successfully, to control drugs getting into prison. As Fr. Peter McVerry has pointed out, very little effort has gone into the treatment side. I point to Denmark, where as much attention is given to trying to control demand for drugs as to the supply of drugs. Moreover, while the Danish prisons have the same sort of screening and security procedures within prison, as well as drug testing and so forth, to try to control the supply, in addition to that each prisoner who still has three months left to serve and who asks for drug treatment is guaranteed to get that within two weeks. That is a policy. In addition, the treatment, where it is needed, is full-time. In one new prison I visited, namely, East Jutland Prison, about which I wrote a bit in my submission, one third of the entire prison is given over to full-time drug treatment for as long as people need. As Fr. McVerry noted, members should compare that with the nine beds in Mountjoy Prison for our entire system. Consequently, there must be that kind of balance between demand control and supply control.

I wish to make one point regarding community service and the issue that has been raised. As people have noted, alternatives to prison very often become add-ons rather then alternatives and do not reduce the prison population. When members visit Finland, they might examine what has been attempted there. I gather from the writings and comments of Tapio Lappi-Seppälä that this has been successful. When they introduced community service on a large scale, they brought in what he calls a two-step solution. The judge gives the sentence, presumably on the same basis as previously, but thereafter another body looks at it and essentially second-guesses it by stating while it is aware the judge sentenced the person to six months in prison, it will consider offering the person community service instead. This means the alternatives are not going to people who would not have gone to prison any way and this appears to work.

Finally, I wish to make one plea regarding conditions and regimes in general. Members should look beyond Mountjoy Prison and St. Patrick's Institution in respect of where the problems are. While there certainly are problems in those places, the dreadful conditions, problems arising from segregation and so forth also apply to some of the prisons we built within the last few decades. They apply to Cloverhill, Midlands, Castlerea and, as has been mentioned, Wheatfield prisons. If one considers somewhere like Harristown wing in Castlerea, with which not many people are familiar, it houses 120 prisoners. The people in Harristown wing are kept separate from all the facilities and activities in the rest of the prison for no apparent good reason and are further divided into four separate groups. There is a huge level of 23-hour lock-up and of doubling up in cells and all that goes wrong with that. Incidentally, I believe the problem with doubling up in cells is that it increases the likelihood of abuse, violence, stress and bullying. Members also must consider some of these newer places. It is the same in Cloverhill, where there are three inmates to a cell. There is little activity for people in Cloverhill and in Harristown wing in Castlerea, the amount is minuscule.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Finally, I invite Mr. Carroll to respond. While our time has almost expired, I note he mentioned cultural attitudes and issues when he spoke previously. I take it he was referring to people in the Prison Service and the Department. However, am I correct that generally speaking in society, the feeling might be that prison is for punishment, that prisoners should be locked up and the key thrown away, that it cannot be hard enough and there should be hard labour, floggings and all that stuff? I believe Dr. McCullagh's comments also may have bordered on that subject. If I am wrong, he should correct me but I refer to that general attitude.

Mr. Eoin Carroll:

In respect of Finland, it appears to have very different media which I am unsure we could replicate here, in that people take out annual subscriptions to newspapers. This appears to have an impact, in that people are less interested in sensationalised news although they do have a fondness for "Big Brother". On culture, it is interesting when one breaks it down a little. A considerable number of years ago, the Irish Penal Reform Trust produced a report on public attitudes towards people who were addicted to drugs or had a drug dependency. When the authors teased out with members of the public whether they would prefer to send someone with a drug dependency to prison or for their drug dependency to be tackled and an alternative offered to address the reason for their criminal behaviour, I believe approximately 75% of the public opted to address the behaviour and the reason behind the criminality. That said, this is not to advertise TheJournal.ie but in the public response to the Irish Penal Reform Trust's position paper during the week, not a single person was in support of it. That was stark. I certainly think it is an uphill effort but as Dr. McCullagh was saying, if one makes decisions and sticks to them, the tide will go back out quickly.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

On Senator Zappone's point on what committees and reports can do-----

Katherine Zappone (Independent)
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Professor O'Donnell started it.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

Finland is interesting, not only because its prison population is low but because it was very high. Consequently, one thing an Oireachtas committee can do is to make a strong and unequivocal statement that the prison population is too high. It can state it is unconscionably high and must come down. Without such a statement, all of the other measures cannot follow. While such a statement is required for the other measures to follow, seldom is it put in such stark terms. I believe a parliamentary committee can state matters have got out of hand and the numbers have drifted too high because of a lack of political will to pull them back down. It can state so doing lies within our control and that getting it back down to a more appropriate level will take time, will be complex and will require taking some risks. A statement along those lines is essential if there is to be movement to bring the numbers back down. A statement from a committee at this level in such spare terms really would help create a context in which a downward momentum might be generated.

Fr. Peter McVerry:

The sub-committee should consider seriously the idea of limiting the numbers in any particular prison. There should be a certain number that can go to Mountjoy or to Wheatfield or wherever. Judges contemplating sending anyone to prison should be obliged to find out if there is a place in the first instance and if not, they must be conscious that someone will be released. This actually happened in the juvenile detention system when Trinity House first opened. It had a certain number of places and a judge in the children's court who wished to send someone to Trinity House had to telephone to ascertain whether a place was available. If not, the judge was obliged to remand the case.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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This still happens in respect of Oberstown. The High Court was sending kids there and it was, as Fr. McVerry described, necessary to check first.

Fr. Peter McVerry:

The only way in which this problem will be addressed effectively is to state that Mountjoy can hold 400 prisoners or whatever, Wheatfield so many and that this number will not be exceeded. That would focus the minds of the Judiciary because its members are critical in this regard. It would focus their minds on whether they really should send certain people to prison in the knowledge that others would be released to make way for them.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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This may involve additional training. Members also considered the issue of a sentencing council and some work was done on that subject recently.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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In response to Professor O'Donnell's point on political commitment, I was greatly struck by a paragraph in Dr. Warner's paper on Finland about the upward swing in the Finnish prison population from 1999 to 2005. It now has turned decisively downwards again as reducing prison numbers is a Government objective. It is a good example and one members must really scrutinise when visiting Finland and about which they must ask more questions.

Clearly a political decision was made and the numbers fell, as the witness said. So it does give us heart that where committees are pushing, governments can change political objectives and change prison numbers. There has been a drift, however, and I do not think there has been any discernible, decisive shift in policy at an articulated level. It has certainly drifted upwards.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

It has not been a policy decision to push it up.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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No.

Professor Ian O'Donnell:

It has just been a corrosive kind of rise upwards, so it can be addressed.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Does Dr. Warner want to come in?

Dr. Kevin Warner:

Senator Bacik is right. There was a rise, between 1999 and 2004 or 2005, of the prison population in Finland. It drifted up as Professor O'Donnell was saying. When I was doing my research there I asked a number of people why it happened. None of them, neither the academics nor the prison management, could really explain it to me. I think it was that they took their eye off the ball for a bit. I interviewed the director general of the prison system. He told me that around that time there was a proposal to build more prisons in response to this rise, although he was not director general at that time. He said he was very grateful that the Finnish Department of Finance refused funding on the basis that to build more prisons would be a waste of money and that it would make more economic sense to have fewer people in prison.

We have not dwelt much today on the economic issue but, as somebody said, our prisons are enormously costly. There are huge savings to be made from reducing the prison population substantially, notwithstanding what Dr. McCullagh has said. Resources can be diverted into alternatives elsewhere.

The other point that should be made is that open prisons cost about half what closed prisons cost in Nordic countries. They are much more effective in terms of not institutionalising people, preparing them for release and treating them with dignity. In or around 35% of prisoners in Denmark, Finland and Norway are in open prisons. The figure for Ireland is 5%. It seems a no brainer that, as well as reducing the prison population, we should aim to make that switch to open prisons. That should be kept in mind.

As well as reducing its prison population, Finland has made deliberate efforts to switch the proportion of those who remain in gaol to open prisons. It has closed some closed prisons and has opened some new open prisons.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for their time. We have almost finished this piece of work, although we will be doing some other visits. We will also invite representatives of the Cornmarket Project in Wexford to meet with us. They are quietly doing some impressive work down there, which is unheralded. I visited them with the Minister and was impressed with what they are doing.

I wish to thank the witnesses again for their attendance here today. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge in this area and we are grateful for their time and effort. We will do our best to ensure that this report will not gather dust on a shelf. We will push this matter as hard as we can to do some of the things the witnesses have suggested. Their contributions have been important to the process. I thank them on behalf of the members of the sub-committee and the Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality.