Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Fr. Peter McVerry once said:

When I was working in an Inner City Parish, we priests used to say that we could predict, with 90% accuracy, which children would end up in prison when we were baptising them. The prison system is the only publicly-funded service available to the poor for which there is no waiting list!

Statistics from the Irish Penal Reform Trust show that prisoners in Ireland are 25 times more likely to come from and return to a seriously deprived area. Children in detention are particularly vulnerable with many having experienced childhood violence or abuse, family difficulty, poverty, mental health issues or learning difficulties. In fact, 40% of those under 16 in custodial remand have a learning disability.

There are some very welcome provisions in today's Bill, in particular, those relating to the amalgamation of the detention schools into one legal entity, the removal of references to St Patrick's Institution and the legal framework on remission for minors. The fundamental issues, however, is that we need to radically rethink the entire imprisonment or detention system in Ireland. The "last resort" principle, which is outlined in the Children Act 2001, is key. While it is enshrined in legislation, in practice, prisons and detention centres continue to pick up the tab for a wide range of social and health issues. A report by the Office of the Ombudsman for Children in 2014 found that remands in custody have been made on welfare grounds. In 2013, the annual cost per child in detention schools was €314,000. For many of these children, a more effective way of investing this money would be to direct towards community-based supports for health and social care.

Advocacy groups such as Empowering People in Care and the Irish Penal Reform Trust, which work with children in detention, have found that the deprivation of liberty and the first-hand experience of the criminal justice system can have highly damaging effects on the well-being of an already vulnerable child and can maintain or aggravate existing trauma and other psychological conditions. Security infrastructure can also be intimidating to children. This is why it is so important that the principle of "last resort" is upheld in practice. Another frightening statistic is that four out of ten people who arrive in prison previously attended some psychiatric service. The Irish Penal Reform Trust indicated that of the 96 children held on remand in 2014, only 27% went on to receive a detention order. Therefore, nearly three quarters of children who are detained are gaining unnecessary experience of the criminal justice system and we can add to this all the children who are in there for other care needs.

HIQA's report published in February this year on inspections carried out at Oberstown in October and November 2014 found that out of a total of ten standards, just one, education, was met in full. It also found serious gaps in child protection, training, health care and staffing. In Fr. Peter McVerry's experience, in many cases we lock people up just to get rid of them. We do not really care what happens to them once they are inside. The idea of locking people away from their communities to punish and, I hope, rehabilitate them and keep society safe from crime is centuries old and well outdated. It is interesting that this incarceration model has survived into modern times without any real engagement with the question of whether it actually is the best system for dealing with crime. According to the Irish Penal Reform Trust, IPRT, Ireland systematically overuses imprisonment as a form of punishment. While the prison population on any given day is close to the European average, the rates of committal to prison on sentence, in other words, the flow of prisoners through the system, mean that Ireland has one of the most punitive criminal justice systems in Europe. I recommend Members read a book by the Jesuits entitled, Re-Imagining Imprisonment in Europe, which is really powerful and contains some wonderful ideas. It would be great if the authorities here were to read it because there is a lot to be learned from it.

In terms of reoffending, the figures in Ireland are startling, with 50% of those released back in prison within four years. According to the IPRT, 18 to 21 year olds have the highest potential for reoffending but also for reform. Once a child reaches the age of 18 years, he or she is no longer able to access the complaints mechanism of the Ombudsman for Children and actually has fewer supports. Mental health supports are also difficult to access after leaving the detention system. We have spoken in this House on numerous occasions about the fact that we have an enormous amount of work to do in the provision of mental health supports. The solution does not lie within the confines of a prison but in community based supports and social policy, housing, education, employment and families. It is the responsibility of the Government to develop policies that will tackle the cycle of poverty and crime. In Ireland the majority of people who are locked up are serving short-term sentences for minor crimes. What about the crimes that hurt all of society? What about corruption, environmental policies that will destroy the planet and the passing of neoliberal legislation that will further deprive those who are already deprived? One in eight children is now living in consistent poverty as a result of Government policies. How many of these children will end up in a detention school or prison?

Andrew Coyle, Professor of Prison Studies at London University, has called for the detention centres of the future to have strong links with the community in which they are based, with detainees having access to local resources and facilities which they would be able to continue using after their release, which would help their reintegration. Above all, the focus must be on detention as a last resort. According to Juliet Lyon, director of the Penal Reform Trust in the United Kingdom, "we must make prisons smaller - smaller in our minds, and smaller in number and capacity." On that point, many months ago the former Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Alan Shatter, brought the issue of Cork Prison before the House. He had some very progressive ideas on prisons and was stronger than most on the issue. It was a huge disappointment when the single cell occupancy option was not chosen in the redevelopment of Cork Prison. The argument was we did not have the money or the space to do so. If we were progressive, we could spend the same amount of money and use the same space but only have half the number of cells. It was not a progressive move to increase the number of cells in the prison. We replaced a prison designed for 146 prisoners with one which could hold up to 310. That is called penal expansion, not progression. Research has shown that if we provide more prison spaces, we will fill them. Prison numbers are more often dictated by policy rather than crime rates. The most obvious result of building bigger prisons is that we create a bigger burden for the taxpayer. That said, the position here is not nearly as bad as in the United States, for example, which has a prison population of over 2 million. That is partly because the prison system in the United States was privatised and powerful vested interests are strongly motivated to increase the numbers in prison. Large corporate business in America is lobbying for an increase in the prison population. Thankfully, bad as we are, we are not as bad as that.

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