Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Question 21: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the recidivism levels within Irish prisons; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40338/08]

Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)
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I wish to advise the Deputy that the Irish Prison Service facilitated a major study of prisoner re-offending by the UCD Institute of Criminology. The study found that 27.4% of released prisoners were serving a new prison sentence with one year. This rose to 39.2% after two years, 45.1% after three years, and 49.2% after four years.

In the context of addressing recidivism, the Irish Prison Service provides a range of rehabilitative programmes which have the dual purpose of providing prisoners with purposeful activity while serving their sentences and encouraging and equipping them to lead productive lives on release. Prisoner rehabilitation involves significant multidimensional input by a diverse range of general and specialist services provided both by the Irish Prison Service and in-reach statutory and non-statutory services. Amongst these are healthcare, psychiatric, psychological, educational, work and training, vocational, counselling, welfare and spiritual services. These services are important in addressing offending behaviour, drug and alcohol addiction, missed educational and vocational opportunities, anger management, and self management in the interest of encouraging positive personal development in prisoners, and preparing them for re-integration and resettlement on release from custody.

Significant progress is also being made in the development of programmes based on risk assessment and rehabilitation needs. The Irish Prison Service is developing and rolling-out, a fully coordinated Integrated Sentence Management System (ISM) across all prisons and places of detention. This system is being piloted in two prisons at the present time and the lessons learned from the evaluation of the pilot will inform the continued roll-out across the prison estate.

In addition, the Probation Service has an active role during the course of the prisoner's sentence in helping maintain links with family and community agencies, encouraging prisoners to address their offending behaviour and engaging prisoners in individual counselling and group counselling programmes such as offending behaviour, addiction, violence and sex offending.