Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate. My contribution will deal more with the importance of politicians discussing prisons in general rather than the detail of the Bill. It is important that Members be very careful about the current debate on prisoners and crime. It is possible, for example, to be fair to the rights of victims and to do a great deal more than has been done so far in providing consideration for what they suffer but, at the same time, to sustain, reform and extend the rights of prisoners. It is not an either/or choice and it is cheap populism to suggest that one set of rights can only be advanced at the expense of the other.

One of the reasons I am interested in the legislation is that I taught the first courses on the island on sociology of deviant behaviour and sociology of law and crime in the 1960s having returned from Manchester University. In addition, I was one of a group that made early attempts to establish an institute of criminology but we were unable to do so because the then Department of Justice refused to permit its employees to attend our meetings and join an institute over which it would not have control. I also served as a member of the MacBride Commission, which heard evidence from people who had been imprisoned for different periods. One of the great tragedies of our hearings in the period between 1977 and 1998 was that people did not want to us to make an official formal complaint about their suffering. This is covered in the Irish Penal Commission report, Crime and Punishment, edited and published by Sean MacBride in 1982.

One of the findings we made during those hearings, which were held over a number of weekends, remains with me. We heard evidence from a chief school attendance officer in Dublin who, with tears in his eyes, said that, having retired, he realised the tragic price that had been paid because of the lack of communication between the Department of Education's school attendance system and the Department of Justice. He referred to the number of young people who were in difficulty regarding school attendance. They came from areas where they had little hope and from families who had experienced multi-generational poverty. He could identify the people who would come before the Children's Court and during his retirement, he often attended the court as a character witness for the children he knew.

We also heard evidence from people who had been detained in Daingean, Letterfrack and other institutions, which later entered to the public realm by way of inquiry. I asked a number of them at different times whether they wished us to hand over their evidence to the police authorities but they were unwilling at that stage. Our report, which was published in 1980, was succeeded by the Whitaker report, which made substantial proposals on the reform of prisons. I regret that it is difficult for one to speak about improving conditions and the rights of prisoners because it will be presented that one is soft on crime or insensitive to the rights of victims in some way or another, which is a travesty. However, it is important for us to realise that we are tested regarding our human rights internationally by the manner in which we speak of prisons.

The history of prisons is interesting and the great 19th century reports were summarised, for example, in Michael Ignatieff's study, A Just Measure of Pain.

In the new State after 1922 we did not study prisons again until the 1930s when the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the Labour Party appointed a commission, the secretary of which was a young Jim Larkin, which reported on the state of the prisons. The next report on prisons was the MacBride commission, of which I was a member in the 1970s, and then we had the Whittaker report leading up to the present time.

The Minister referred to the fact that progress is under way on consideration of the elimination of slopping out. I have visited prisons in Ireland and abroad and I have studied the reform movements in some of the Scandinavian countries. Slopping out is the last thing to be changed in any prison reform system I have examined. The reason for that is it is such a symbolic act of loss of discretion. One can reduce the argument to very simple principles. Prison is about the absence of discretion — over time, space and one's own body. It is interesting in the history of reform that even in the many states which have been willing to reform in regard to discretion over time, for example, in allowing people out of prison, or discretion in regard to space by having more open regimes, the last thing they have relinquished is slopping out. It is barbarism, it is outrageous and it is in contravention of international law. It is a point that has been made against Ireland at the human rights hearings in Geneva. It is not good enough to say one has its elimination under consideration.

I do not have time to go into what I feel and it is something I find difficult to speak about, namely, the beating to death of a prisoner in the basement of Mountjoy — Gary Douche. I do not understand how an individual can be asked to share a room with six other people, be beaten to death and be found in the morning with excrement on his head. Irrespective of whoever is in charge of justice in a state, this is an appalling indictment of prison systems.

Under what circumstances should one send people to prison? I spoke about many reports, including the Whittaker report, which was published in 1982. If there is one finding that screams from the pages of this and other reports, it is that one should use all the non-custodial options that are available. If, for example, Whittaker could notice an increase in crime against property, but also, in addition, that a large number of people were going to prison for the non-payment of fines, logic would dictate the benefits of getting people off the conveyor belt that was prison rather than putting people into a culture where they would learn about criminality.

The way the system works is rather like this — I say this as a sociologist. One begins with the base of a pyramid of deviant behaviour, for example, some of which is never detected, and one moves up to near the top of one pyramid, where it is turned into criminal actions against which there is a sanction. Then one moves over to the other pyramid and one has a process by which one has detection, confrontation, bringing a suspect before the courts and so forth. At each of these stages there is a self-defining activity going on in regard to how the person views himself or herself. Evidence is available from abroad in every jurisdiction that the more people one enables to escape from each stage of the labelling process, the better chance people have of rehabilitating themselves, becoming part of the community and participating in it.

We must question ourselves about the way we run prisons. We run them appallingly. The visiting committees have been a joke. I remember, for example, going to Limerick Prison at one stage and gathering some information from there in regard to the women's prison. Our proposals at that time were very much focused on trying to secure that the prison rules would be on display in the prisons themselves. There were other informal rules that were not contained in the prison rules on display. Examples in the women's prison related to the number of times one could change one's underwear, the kind of hairstyle one was allowed and whether one was allowed to wear make-up or jewellery. They were cruel and terrible impositions outside the law.

I speak about this because I feel we are in a vacuum where no one will be free in the present atmosphere that is being whipped up both in regard to the volume of crime and the response to it. I understand just as much as anybody in this House the effect of attacks on the elderly, the appalling trauma one suffers after the invasion of one's space in one's home or body, but one can do everything for the victims of crime without interfering or taking from the minimum we allow in regard to rights of prisoners. It is so clear to us that we are running the prisons in a primitive way.

I have another interesting point in regard to the conveyor belt that is pushing people into prisons. There is a huge distinction between those factors which affect the rates of crime in the different categories and the incidence of crime. Usually, for example, socio-economic factors will explain fluctuations in the crime rate but one needs to do case studies to know what it is that delivers a person through incidences to becoming a person who commits a crime. It is a very subtle notion also in regard to excitation and excitement, particularly in regard to crimes involving motor car abuse at present. A volume of work requires to be done in this regard.

Currently, eight people are in Mountjoy waiting to go to the Central Mental Hospital. If one is on methadone when one goes into Mountjoy, one can continue with methadone treatment, but if one wants, for example, to get off drugs and go on methadone while in Mountjoy, one cannot do so. One cannot begin treatment there. Is it reasonable for one to get a megaphone and start blasting messages to the public about what one is going to do about the number of prison places when at the same time one is not providing a psychiatric service for those who need it who happen to be in prison? In every place where there has been good prison reform, the health service is looking after the health of prisoners. That is not a prison function. It should be separated from prison administration and be handled by the health authorities because one is dealing with a citizen's psychological and health welfare.

In 1982, when Whittaker was reporting, the cost of a prison place was £29,000 per year. The annual cost is now over €90,000 and it is over €100,000 in the case of Mountjoy. It is a destructive way of dealing with individuals who happen to have broken the law. We have been unable to examine the implications of this approach. If we were to go back to first principles, one would ask the question and look at the process which is made certain. The struggle of the 18th century was making incarceration certain. The origin of prison is of putting people into cells. Very often prisons were in monasteries. People did not know of what they were accused, how long they would be there or in what condition they would get out of prison. Therefore, the great movement of the 18th century, which was described by people like Sir Leon Radzinowicz, was towards establishing certainty of the offence, the process and the treatment.

In the 19th century, the industrialists and those who wanted prisons shared a great moment when they were influenced by Bentham. They thought they could try to control everything from a single point — the image of the panopticon — and thus it is at Pentonville we see the people throwing their silk hats in the air as the Prince of Wales opened the prison. From that time on, we in Ireland were interested in the history of prison reform and sometimes in political prisoners, but very often they were anxious to separate themselves from the general condition of prisoners.

I have visited prisons. I have read poems in the secure section of Mountjoy and, built as it was in those circumstances for different purposes, it is outrageous that prison staff have to work there. I made reference to the Gary Douche case. On the day of that crime, the prison was over capacity. That is a fact. It is quite scandalous that the forensics of that case are not available. Perhaps they are but I have not seen them and I cannot recover them.

We are really talking about the alternatives to prison. Other speakers have raised the issue of why the Minister has chosen in this legislation to establish himself as a unique planning authority in regard to prisons, taking powers to himself that should normally be within the planning process. People have made representations to us on that and they appear to be reasonable. When I served on the body that examines prisons, we came to the conclusion that there were hardly any cases where the incarceration of women in prison were justified. At that time two women required to be in a secure environment. One was a very famous case. The rest were cases relating to repeated shoplifting, stealing etc. It makes no sense to ignore the statistics. If 80% of those in prison for non-payment of fines re-offend and are back in prison within four years, why does the Minister of State not address this fact? There is a notion that people do not want to visit prisons. I was very well aware that a judge who sentences someone to prison is entitled to visit a prison, day or night, to observe the conditions to which he has sent someone. A few very notable people did because they were interested. That is why I take very seriously what the current prison inspector has said and the comments made about the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

Deputy Neville referred to clothing being removed from prisoners considered to be suicidal and their being left in solitary confinement. A definitive study from Harvard Medical School shows the destructive effects of solitary confinement to one's mental health.

It is interesting to consider the history of the Quakers. They examined the whole history of prison. They examined the notion whether one should expunge one's guilt through hard work or hard labour. Before that in the American experience they tried putting people into solitary confinement and leaving them with the Bible so that it would lead the person to find Jesus and through that they would recover. When they studied this, the unfortunate man who wrote about this found that most of the people in the American system had gone mad. The Harvard study, carried out by Professor Grassian in the past 12 months shows that it is a most destructive thing to put a person into solitary confinement. I am certain that we are breaching human rights as I speak in relation to the conditions in prison. I welcome that the Irish Penal Reform Trust has been able to establish, at least in the High Court — although it is on appeal to the Supreme Court — a locus standi in relation to the right to take cases in defence of having decent and dignified conditions in our prisons.

Those who have visited prisons are aware of the level of illiteracy in prisons. Prisoners exchange cigarettes and chocolates and give each other presents in return for writing letters. Today is St. Valentine's Day and a literate prisoner may be given presents to write letters to members of another prisoner's family. These are the conditions in prison and it is not a matter of saying that we need more places. We need better conditions.

The Dóchas facility is a good facility that should not be closed down. It will be closed in the move to the new prison but it should be used as a model. We should not state that conditions in it are too soft. We are tested every time we speak about prisons as to whether we refer to revenge, retribution or rehabilitation. We should first of all remove as many people as possible from the conveyor belt to prison. Those in prison who need medical treatment should receive it and those who must stay in prison should have an assurance of respect for their dignity. We are not forced to choose between appropriate recognition of the rights of victims and expanding and establishing the rights of prisoners.

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