There is a lot to feel aggrieved about in Ireland right now. But not everything is totally banjaxed. And in certain respects, we are perhaps beginning to get things right.

Anyone who has taken an interest in the treatment of people who are sentenced to jail in Ireland will be aware that a dreadful error was made during the lifetime of the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition. Michael McDowell was Minister for Justice when a decision was taken to buy Thornton Hall in North Dublin, and to locate a new prison there to replace Mountjoy Jail.
A whopping €44.9 million was spent on the project, with the intention of creating a prison that could accommodate up to 2,200 prisoners.
I may not be an expert on the subject, but I immediately knew instinctively that this was a totally ill-conceived idea. The first question that occurred, reading news reports at the time, was: how will families be able to visit their relatives in prison?
Most of the prisoners in Mountjoy are from working-class areas of Dublin. It’s possible therefore, even for those without cars, to visit their partners, children or family members, who are incarcerated, on a regular basis. The same would not apply to a jail in the wilds of rural North Dublin. The decision, therefore, had nothing to do with the needs or wants of the prison population. In fact, it smacked of a far more sinister attitude. These individuals have been found guilty of committing crimes. Therefore they have forfeited the right to have their interests considered. Who cares, if it is an additional punishment on them that they will not be able to see their families as frequently?
That wasn’t the only problem with the plan. The scale of the increase in prison accommodation being created seemed to reflect an official attitude that would almost certainly be self-fulfilling: we are going to lock up an increasing number of people over the next number of years; therefore we need bigger prisons; therefore we will lock more people up because the space is available. The bucaneering adage ‘build it and they will come’ took on a freshly twisted logic. It was as if the fundamental desire to reduce the numbers requiring imprisonment was being pernasnently abandoned.
Well, the death of the Celtic Tiger had at least this one positive outcome. There was no money to proceed with Thornton Hall, a thoroughly discredited piece of right-wing social engineering, which may in time rank up there with the electronic voting machines (and the catastrophic stupidity of spending a fortune on storing them) as one of the greatest fiascos in recent everyday Irish government decision-making.
With available funds slashed as the public finances collapsed, a rethink was needed. And so the far more obvious and more desirable project of initiating a long-overdue refurbishment of Mountjoy Jail itself got under way.
It was, I believe, a measure of the contempt in which prisoners were generally held by policy-makers here that the prison had been allowed to fall into such appalling disrepair. Most ordinary Irish citizens were unaware of the inherent degradation of ‘slopping out’ that was a fact of daily life for prisoners; of the overcrowding which saw misfortunate inmates being held, over a sustained period, in the basement cells which were intended only for very short-term use; of prisoners being dumped in cells together in a way that led to tensions, and frequently to violence; and of the critical lack of the kind of facilities which might have encouraged rehabilitation.
As a result, Mountjoy has been a notoriously unpleasant place to stay, and to work. The culture of criminality is deeply entrenched within the prison. Gang affiliations persist. Tensions, bullying and violence are commonplace. A first-timer going in there is unlikely to avoid having to align with one camp or another. Far from offering those who were new to crime – or new to detention – an opportunity to begin the process of rebuilding their lives, the far greater likelihood was that they would be further sucked into a world where criminality is a badge of honour.
It is heartening, therefore, to know that building work is currently ongoing in Mountjoy. And to read that there are genuine signs that the changes that have already been effected in C Wing – putting toilets and washing facilities into cells and generally modernising the prison space – are lifting morale in the prison, among both staff and the prisoner population, in a comprehensively positive way.
Quoted by Conor Lally, in a report in the Irish Times, Fr. Peter McVerry – a man who is involved with disadvantaged inner city communities close to Mountjoy and who strives to see the world from their perspective – was almost effusive in what he had to say about the improvements. It may be paradoxical to describe C Wing as a ‘wonderful’ place to have to spend your sentence but he did. “If the other wings are refurbished,” he added, “and the policy remains one person one cell, it could be the model for all our other prisons.”
But of course, that is a big if. Mountjoy is designed to accommodate 489 prisoners. The Inspector of Prisons has stated that it should hold no more than 540. In practice it has latterly had to accommodate over 700 prisoners at any one time. That represents an overload of almost 30%. So how can the policy of one person/one cell be carried through?
The answer is obvious, though it’s not one that will appeal to the ideologues behind the prevailing attitude to criminals – where the emphasis has shifted entirely from rehabilitation to punishment. It would be wrong to blame politicians, and policy-makers in the public service, alone for this new orthodoxy. The media, and the tabloids in particular, have played a part, with the inexorable rise in the hype surrounding crime and criminality fueling the incidence of institutional abuse.
The mantra coined by Tony Blair was that ‘new’ Labour in Great Britain would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. Ireland followed that coinage slavishly. But in practice, both there and here, the second part of the equation was forgotten. Tough on crime? The numbers in jail rose. But little or nothing was done to address the root causes of crime: the endemic social disadvantage, lack of education and opportunity, illiteracy, exclusion, discrimination, unemployment and poverty that blighted, and still blights, parts of all of our major urban centres. Instead, the official approach seemed to be: corral them in sink estates and throw them in jail if they start to adversely affect the general population.
Well, it is time to take a fresh look at all of that. In a thoughtful opinion piece in the Irish Times, Ian O’Donnell, Professor of Criminology in UCD, made a very strong case for reducing our reliance on prison sentences. For a start, it is utterly crazy that 4,500 fine defaulters were jailed in the first six months of 2012. That equates to an astonishing 9,000 over a 12 month period – a likely 20% increase on 2011. While, characteristically, these individuals do not end up staying for very long in prison, they represent both a ludicrous cost to the State – and also a huge pressure on an already overcrowded system.
Even more crucially, from a US study, O’Donnell confirms the core truth: that early intervention in socially deprived communities, through educational initiatives, parent training, family therapy and home visitation, significantly reduces the extent to which children end up in conflict with the system. Every dollar – or euro – invested in social initiatives of this type produces a return, up to ten fold. This, of course, is not rocket science. The conventional view, assiduously nurtured by politicians and the media, is that people who get involved in crime are bad apples. The truth is that, more often than not, their resort to crime is systemic, and that – with some exceptions of course – first and foremost, they are victims of disadvantage and deprivation.
There are other ways in which the prison population might be reduced. Alternatives to imprisonment, including community service and restorative justice, must be placed top of the agenda, especially for those who are on a first offence. Similarly, effective use of remission for prisoners who take part in treatment programmes can substantially reduce the prison population – while actively diminishing the likelihood of recidivism. And finally, a more carefully structured parole system, open to all prisoners, would also allow both for earlier release and for better monitoring of ex-prisoners, to assist them in making the transition back to a crime-free civilian life. To which I would add the legalisation of cannabis as a final element that would drastically reduce costs, at every level of the criminal justice system.
It is hard to speak up for those who break the law in a week in which a bunch of thugs, most likely paramilitary, shot dead a Garda, in the course of robbing €4,000 from a credit union in Jenkinstown, in Dundalk. There isn’t a shred of justification for violence of that kind – and the sense of urgency about bringing the culprits to justice is perfectly understandable.
But it is no disrespect to the victim, Detective Garda Adrian Donoghue, or to his grieving family, who deserve all of our sympathy and compassion, to say that one of the most effective ways of reducing criminality is to actively address the issues of inequality, deprivation and lack of education that have poisened Irish society for as long as I can remember – and which have deepened over the past 10 or 15 years to an extent that is unforgivable.
People who are guilty of heinous crimes must answer for them and face the full rigours of the law. There is no sane argument to the contrary. But we cannot escape the unvarnished truth that the best way of minimising crime is to eliminate poverty and disadvantage.