Running To Stand Still

It's more than curious. Every day in the national newspapers, you read the stories. The gardaí have seized another shipment of heroin, with an estimated street value of £5 million. Or £25 million even. Overpage, there's a piece about the seizure of assets belonging to one alleged godfather or another, by the Criminal Assets Bureau. Impressive stuff you might say. Obviously the crackdown is working. Sure we'll have cleaned up the city in no time. Everyone can relax.

And then the Dublin Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign publishes its report and the grim truth is spelled out, in no uncertain terms. There are more heroin addicts in Dublin than ever before. The latest estimate is 13,460 of whom only 3,675 are currently in treatment. Which leaves almost 10,000 heroin users out there breaking the law, once, twice, three times a day and maybe even more. Now that's a hell of a lot of law-breaking going on and it doesn't even begin to measure the bag-snatching, counter-jumping, shop-lifting, house-breaking and other petty misdemeanours being carried out by addicts desperate for the money to fund the next fix.

So let's step back for just a minute and, one more time with feeling, ask the question that Hot Press has asked repeatedly over the past number of years. If all the muscle that the State has at its disposal is being thrown at the problem and the number of addicts is still rising, is there any hope that the prohibitionist approach will ever reap the promised dividend? Is there any point in criminalising the 13,000 addicts currently living in Dublin? Is there any sense in creating the kind of environment where they have to steal to feed their habits? And is there even the slightest benefit to be derived from dumping these same individuals in Mountjoy Jail, or some other hellhole, when they're caught coming out the window of a car they've just relieved of its stereo system?

Stop and think about it: as long as heroin is illegal, and heroin addicts can only get the drug from dealers, in jail or out of it, each addict is costing the State somewhere in the region of £100,000 per annum. Which means that the heroin problem is costing up to £1,364,000,000 every year. Now I'm aware that you could subject that estimate to a certain level of pressure and bring it down, but it does give some sense of the scale of the calamity that's involved. Between keeping people in prison, dragging them through the courts, employing cops to chase them around, supplying them with methadone, AIDS treatment if they're HIV positive and other forms of health care, and cleaning up after they carry out one kind of robbery or another, the cost is colossal.

So let's begin to explore the possibility that there might be another way.

The average heroin addict has no fundamental criminal intent. So why criminalise them? I know that it's the kind of suggestion that a bureaucratic mind finds it difficult to deal with, but to decriminalise heroin and make the drug itself, rather than methadone, legally available would at one stroke eliminate eight of the ten key ways in which heroin addiction costs society. In particular it would give heroin addicts their dignity back, along with their respect within the law.

Meanwhile rather than spending money policing the apparently unpoliceable, funds could be poured into the inner-city communities that are currently the worst heroin blackspots. Release 500 drug addicts from our prisons and put #100,000 for each of them into the communities from which they come over the next 12 months #50 million wouldn't cure the problem but it would go a long way towards providing an antidote to the endemic problems of educational disadvantage, unemployment, demoralisation and crime which blight Dublin's ghettoes.

A positive and proactive campaign of this kind is much more likely to produce results in the long run. The desire to punish people is ingrained within Judeo-Christian culture, which is why jail is such a popular concept with so many people in Irish society. But is it the best response to minor crimes, when all it seems to do is produce more crime?

In fact the same question applies where certain serious criminal actions are concerned. We're all very familiar by now with the Philip Sheedy case. In a horrendous drunk-driving accident the Dublin architect was responsible for killing a pedestrian, Anne Ryan. He was sentenced to four years imprisonment by Judge Matthews, in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Later, in an incident which subsequently led to the resignation of Supreme Court Judge Hugh O'Flaherty, High Court Judge Cyril Kelly and the Dublin County Registrar Michael Quinlan, he was released after just one year in prison.

Public comment on the case to date has generally focussed on the circumstances surrounding Sheedy's release. But very few people have asked if a jail sentence was the appropriate punishment in the first place. I know that the experience was an utterly devastating one for the Ryan family and that the pain and grief caused to them by Philip Sheedy's recklessness will never really heal. But even bearing that in mind, I don't believe that jail was necessarily the answer. By all means, ban someone who is responsible for this kind of horror from driving, for life. Make them do community service of a substantial, long-term kind. Make them pay compensation. But there is no point in imposing a jail sentence unless it is specifically necessary to keep someone who is likely to be a danger to society off the streets.

It has nothing to do with class. I railed in this column against the six-year sentence imposed by Hugh O'Flaherty on heroin addict Sabrina Walsh for bag snatching: at worst I argued she should have been given the Probation Act.

The bottom line is that the emphasis should be on finding ways to keep people out of prison, rather than demanding that they be locked up.

There is a better way.