Middle classes ‘are aiding drug barons’
That was the warning yesterday from the inspector of prisons, Judge Michael Reilly.
Since he took up his role in Jan 2008, Judge Reilly said he had never encountered one person whose life had been improved by prison.
Speaking to the MacGill summer school in Donegal, he said certain elected representatives and elements of the press had made inflammatory statements which had fed into people’s prejudices about prisoners.
He said slopping out in prisons would, soon, nearly be a thing of the past after 150 years of degrading treatment for inmates, and would lead to only one wing in Portlaoise Prison left without cell sanitation.
However, overcrowding was still a problem in Irish jails, as were the distribution of drugs, he said.
Inmates and their families, he noted, incurred “enormous debts” for drugs secured behind bars, sometimes up to 10 times the original value of the drugs.
However, to rounds of applause in Glenties yesterday he lashed out at the middle classes for supporting the drugs trade.
“If those in middle class society, who live in the leafy suburbs and who have good jobs and a reasonable standard of living, did not engage in recreational drug taking, the drug barons would be less powerful and the impact on prisons might well be less,” he said.
“I have not found one person who has been improved by prison. On the contrary all available research shows that most people are damaged in one way or another by prison.”
St Vincent de Paul national president Geoff Meagher told the summer school that numbers requesting help from the society surged by over 100% since 2009. The range of requests had become more complex, including high and multiple debt issues.
Challenges facing people had spread from those dependent on welfare payments, those in low paid work and those traditionally regarded as ‘middle class’.
Following successive difficult Government budgets, Mr Meagher said society was now helping people with cuts in family income, welfare payments, health and education supports to “the poorest households in the country resulting from the austerity measures”.
