Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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329. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality the average cost of the detention of a prisoner within the prison system; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [44242/15]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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The Irish Prison Service calculates the average annual cost of an available staffed prison space for inclusion in the Annual Report. For 2014, the latest year for which a figure is available, the cost was €68,959.

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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330. To ask the Minister for Justice and Equality the average number of prisoners detained within the prison system in each year from 2010 to date in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [44243/15]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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The information requested by the Deputy is set out in the following table. Figures are taken from the Annual Reports for the Irish Prison Service.

The Deputy will be aware that the average number of prisoners in custody in Ireland rose from 3,321 during 2007 to 4,318 during 2012, an increase of over 30%. Likewise the total number of committals to prison also rose sharply during the same period, from 11,934 in 2007 to 17,026 in 2012 – an increase of over 43%.

2013 saw the first significant decrease in prison numbers since 2007. There were 15,735 committals to prison in 2013 which was a decrease of 7.6% on the 2012 figure. The overall daily average number of prisoners in custody has also dropped in recent years. The average number in custody for 2014 was 3,916 a reduction of 10.8% on the 2011 average of 4,390.

The Deputy may wish to note that the number in custody reached a peak of 4,621 on 23rd February 2011. On 7 December 2015 there are 904 less prisoners in custody which represents a decrease of 19%.

As the Deputy will be aware, the Irish Prison Service employs a wide range of approaches in addressing prisoners offending behaviours. While it is important to note that the best indication of future offending are the age, gender, offence type and the criminal history of the individual, there are also dynamic factors that the prisons and other agencies can address. These include employment status, education level, family situation and drug and addiction issues. In addition there are more complex psychological factors that are associated with offending that can also be addressed by the prison system.

To address these issues the Irish Prison Service has rolled out Integrated Sentence Management (ISM) across all Prisons. This is a prisoner-centred, multidisciplinary approach to working with prisoners with provision for initial assessment, goal setting and periodic review to measure progress.

Prisoner rehabilitation involves significant multidimensional input by a diverse range of general and specialist services provided both by the Irish Prison Service and in-reaching statutory and non-statutory services. Amongst these are healthcare, psychiatric, psychological, educational, 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.

Since 2011, the Irish Prison Service has introduced a number of new schemes to specifically aid prisoner reintegration and reduce re-offending. The Community Return Scheme is an initiative whereby carefully selected prisoners, serving sentences between 1 year and 8 years, can be granted reviewable temporary release coupled with a requirement to do community service work such as painting, gardening or graffiti removal in a supervised group setting. The type of work involved is intended to assist the community and the scheme is involved with a large number of charitable organisations and local community groups.

A recent report on the Community Return Scheme has showed that there were 232 persons released in the first year of the Scheme, from October 2011 to end September 2012. Of this group the report highlighted that as at the end of year 2013, 91% of those involved in the Scheme had not returned to custody.

In addition to Community Return, a Community Support Scheme has also been introduced to reduce recidivism rates of short term prisoners by arranging for additional support structures post release and by providing for a more structured form of temporary release.

The Central Statistics Office has published two recidivism studies, for 2007 and 2008, the latter of which shows an overall reduction in recidivism of 4.3% from the previous year. The latest recidivism study, for 2009, will be published on 14 December 2015. The publication of these recidivism studies and of future studies allows the Irish Prison Service access to a comprehensive bank of data in relation to the rate of recidivism among ex-prisoners. This will help to inform future policy on the management of offenders and will facilitate the formulation of new strategies aimed at reducing recidivism

The Deputy will also be aware that I have recently launched the Joint Agency Response to Crime initiative (JARC), which aims to implement a multi-agency approach to the management of crime, to prioritise certain prolific offenders and to develop specific initiatives which will address their behaviour and reduce crime thereby increasing community safety.