Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Like other Deputies, I warmly welcome this Bill and congratulate Deputy Clare Daly for yet again having the courage to raise a very difficult subject in this Chamber. As she said, we rarely hear any discussion about prisons or prisoners except from the gutter press, which portrays prison life as these people being in some kind of a hotel regime and that, therefore, it is a wonderful place to be.

I had a short experience in prison along with Deputy Clare Daly approximately 13 years ago. We were treated very differently from other prisoners, an issue to which I will return. What has been said about the nature of the torture imposed in terms of the basic principle of the deprivation of one's liberty should be sufficient to act as a punitive measure rather than heaping more and more punishment on a person.

The way in which society deals with those in prison says a great deal about it. It is rare that prisoners' conditions and human rights are spoken of in this House, or even outside it, without a cry of law and order and clamour for various reasons to lock them up, throw away the key and oblige them to live in harsher conditions. It is no exaggeration to say that the reality of prison life in this country is a stain on how we continue to deal with the question of prisoners. I argue it reflects a wider class bias that is deeply inherent in Irish society. That was something we witnessed in the women's prison in Mountjoy. The vast majority of prisoners were incarcerated because they were poor, not because they were necessarily violent or outrageously bad people. They came from certain socioeconomic backgrounds, which meant that they ended up robbing, taking drugs or, as other speakers noted, in many cases they had found themselves homeless or suffered from psychiatric illnesses and were thrown to the four winds by this society because there was no help for them on the outside. I remember one woman who was regularly released because her prison term was up and within a day she would be banging on the door to get back in because there was nowhere for her outside those walls.

On any given day, according to the Irish Penal Reform Trust, 150 prisoners are held on a 23-hour lock-up for their own protection and an unspecified number are held for a variety of reasons, including discipline. The trust notes - as have previous speakers - the mental health harm that is done to prisoners kept in isolation. Studies compiled by other bodies show that mental health harm when one is kept in isolation is irreversible.

The Minister of State mentioned in his retort to Deputy Clare Daly the reduction by 85% in the number of prisoners being locked up from 22 to 23 hours. If we consider the figures for that cohort of prisoners being locked up for 22 to 23 hours, that is probably true. It is interesting to note that when those most recent figures were recorded in 2013, there were 190 prisoners locked up for 23 hours. Almost a quarter of those individuals - some 23% - were imprisoned at St. Patrick's Institution, which is now closed. I seriously question those statistics. The Minister of State should look at them again. If we consider the cohort of prisoners locked up for 22 to 23 hours in solidarity confinement, we should not ignore those who are locked up for 21 hours, the number of whom, 170, is quite significant and the even greater number who are locked up for 19 hours. We need to look at those figures again because we are talking about prisoners being locked up for most of the day, certainly for all of their waking hours, where they are held away from human contact and from any sort of normal activity.

Restrictions are imposed, certainly at Castlerea Prison, on the number of visits people can receive. It has to do with the realignment of the resources and cutbacks on hours. Many families travel long distances. Again, they come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and they cannot afford to travel up from Dublin or Cork up and down Castlerea on trains, buses, or cars. When they visit their loved ones, they try to spend the entire day there - a few hours in the morning and evening - but they are being deprived of that contact as well. There are many problems with our prisons.

There is also the issue of what it costs to keep a prisoner in prison. It might seem crude to talk about the monetary aspect. It is disgraceful that we are spending an estimated €65,500 a year to keep a prisoner in a place of detention when we could consider alternatives such as community service, which would cost €2,200 a year. With community service, the person would be educated, watched over, given some guidance and training and they would also make a contribution to the wider community. The question of resources is never an excuse to deprive people of their human rights when they are locked up because most of them should not be locked up in the first place. We know only too well the scandal of many people who have spent time in prison because they refused to, failed to or could not afford to pay fines or bills. Even if they are sent to prison for a day or two days, it an outrageously incorrect use of resources by the State, which could be used to rehabilitate, train and help those people out of a conveyer belt-type system that sees them repeatedly offend and be sent back to prison. Experience shows that the latter is often the case with many prisoners.

In Ireland, prisoners are 25 times more likely to come from and return to socioeconomically-deprived areas. More than 70% of prisoners are unemployed on committal and they do not have a trade or an occupation. Most of them will have literacy problems. More than 300 prisoners who attend the school in Mountjoy are barely able to sign their names. We have to look at this as a class-biased system, as well as all the other cruelties relating to prison and with solitary confinement. This cohort of socioeconomically-deprived prisoners are bound also at some point to end up in long hours of lock-up. How will that do anything other than embitter them, damage their psychological and physical health and put them back on the conveyer belt to which I referred?

Our attitude to overcrowding in Irish prisons has not changed that much. If we cannot solve it by building more prisons, which we will not do, we have to reconsider matters in the context of why and how we send so many people to prison.

I want to finish by fleshing out the argument about there being a class bias in our system. We all know of well-known characters in recent Irish history who have had to go to jail, the late Liam Lawlor and Ray Burke among them. I want to refer to an article written by The Irish Timescorrespondent, Fintan O'Toole, when Sean Quinn Jnr. was locked up for three months for talking approximately €500 million that should have been available to the Irish State and lying about its whereabouts. He was sentenced to three months in prison but he spent one night in Mountjoy and was sent directly to the training unit. The make-up of prisoners in the training unit should be those who have served long terms, who are in rehabilitation and who need training before they exit the prison system. However, we know that when Seán Quinn Jnr. was in the training unit he had his mobile telephone, his laptop and all the rest with him. Most of the 4,000 male prisoners would want to be where Seán Quinn Jnr. was on that occasion. Many of them are on a waiting list for entry to the training unit but they come from the wrong class, the wrong background and have committed the wrong sort of offences. Many of them probably committed much lesser offences than that committed by Seán Quinn Jnr.

When we look at this issue, we should do so in the context of two kinds of Ireland, namely, that which is class biased and in which there are two types of crime and that which treats two types of criminals very differently. That means that our compassion and understanding of the reason solitary confinement is immoral, outdated and criminal. The latter is why it is so important that we flesh out Deputy Clare Daly's Bill and allow it to proceed to Committee Stage. It is also the reason that we should take it very seriously. The Government is not doing any of us a service in the context of justice and ending class bias in this society by trying to block it.

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