Last Tuesday the President of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) met the Minister for Justice and the Minister for Health.
Alan Mitchell had a lot to discuss with Jim O’Callaghan and Jennifer Carroll MacNeill arising from the council’s visits to Irish prisons last year, including violent incidents, deaths in custody, the treatment of prisoners in segregation and those on restricted regimes as well as women prisoners. The CPT president was also keen to discuss the treatment of prisoners with serious mental disorders and the pathways of care into and out of the Central Mental Hospital in Portrane.
The persistent failure of the government of a wealthy country to address these problems, many of which were flagged as far back as 2021, is clearly a source of bafflement to the CPT. The Government’s foot-dragging when it comes to penal reform is probably less of a surprise to Mark Kelly, the chief inspector of prisons, who published his annual report earlier this month.
He found that ongoing overcrowding and poor healthcare had contributed to a 50 per cent increase in prison deaths last year. He described conditions – which require many prisoners to sleep on mattresses – as unacceptable, inhumane and degrading.
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The prison system is currently at 120 per of capacity and around 500 of the 5,628 inmates are sleeping on floors. The blame cannot be put on the Irish Prison Service (IPS) , according to Kelly. The service has been among the first to sound the alarm about the deterioration of conditions and is obliged to receive every prisoner sent to it by the courts. It has virtually exhausted its options to reduce numbers through early release and other measures, according to the inspector.
The two minsters no doubt highlighted the commitments made in the budget to address prison overcrowding when they met the CPT. Funding for the service was increased by €79 million to €525 million to address overcrowding. They can also point to the revised National Development Plan which provides €495 million for a building programme to increase capacity by more than 1,500 over the next five years.
More investment in the prisons is obviously part of the solution to overcrowding, but the Government cannot simply build its way out of the mess that is the Irish penal system.
As the CPT, Inspector of prisons and the Irish Penal Reform Trust have all argued, much more needs to be done in relation to staff numbers and training, health care provision, rehabilitation and alterative remedies to prison time for minor offenders and those serving short sentences. This problem is not somehow going to solve itself and is yet another sign of the State’s failure to deal with a rising population.
