Ms Caron McCaffrey:

The Senator did not misunderstand and it was probably me when I spoke at the citizens' assembly. Some 79% of everybody who comes to our custody every year comes for less than 12 months and of that group of people, 70% come for less than six months. With remission, one is looking at a sentence of four and a half months, so in terms of having treatment for addiction, that period is clearly insufficient to meet a person's need. It is one of the reasons we are working with Merchants Quay now because if we start somebody on a programme, or with a counsellor in the prison, we need to make sure that he or she is in a position to continue and do not lose any gains when he or she goes back out to his or her communities. I will ask Ms Hume to comment specifically on the Merchants Quay arrangement and our thinking there.

One of the recommendations by the assembly was that we should provide addiction services to everybody, even people serving less than 12 months. The reality is that if a person is in a custodial setting for four months or four and half months, it is very hard for us to provide a service. We also find that where people are serving short sentences, they do not have the motivation to actually address the root causes of their offending. They are in for a very short period, so they keep their head down and look at the gate. Whereas when people are with us serving longer sentences, we have a much greater ability to get under those root causes of offending and help people through addiction counselling or through the treatment and rehabilitation programme, TARP, or through psychological intervention to deal with the issues that contribute to the addiction.