Ministers too keen on prisons, says judge

A SUPREME Court judge yesterday criticised the Government’s willingness to spend “enormous resources” on prisons while failing to fund crime-prevention measures.

Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness said that district and children’s court judges were “doomed to despair” at the lack of resources given to the Probation Service.

Mrs Justice McGuinness said the Children Act 2001 was an “encouraging instrument of change” aimed at reverting the trend over many years of children ending up in St Patrick’s Institution and subsequently Mountjoy Jail.

Speaking at a conference organised by Dublin Institute of Technology, she said “sadly” large sections of the act had not been brought into effect.

She said the Government cry was that the resources were not there to do so.

“This cry really won’t stand up to analysis. This State does not have a great problem spending relatively enormous resources for more prison places and building new prisons.”

The Supreme Court judge said the same investment wasn’t being made in preventative measures, such as young people at risk, families at risk, alternatives to custody and funding for the Probation Service.

She said judges now had to wait many weeks and even months to get a report from the Probation Service and that judges were “doomed to failure” at the lack of resources. She said alternatives to custody were “desperately needed”.

Guest speaker Dr Barry Goldson, a senior sociology lecturer at University of Liverpool, said he was “very disappointed” to hear that legislation raising the age of criminal responsibility in Ireland from seven to 12 had hit a stumbling block.

He said the new proposal - to raise it to ten - would still keep Ireland at the bottom of the EU ladder, along with England and Wales. The age of criminal responsibility will remain at seven in the case of murder.

He said offending was “a normal part of growing up” and that the vast majority of juvenile crime was petty, opportunistic and inexpertly executed.

He said juvenile justice systems that criminalise children early and lock them up were “consistently unsuccessful”. He said academics should challenge the “context of fear” regarding youth crime created by the media and politicians.

Inspector Finbarr Murphy of the Garda Juvenile Office said there were 17,656 referrals to the office in 2004, out of a population of 616,500 people under the age of 18. “Some 97% of children don’t get involved in crime,” he said.

His colleague Inspector Paul Moran said gardaí were not “in the business of arresting children and bringing them to court”.

He said the office had two very good tools - the Youth Diversion Programme and the Youth Diversion Projects - to steer children away from crime.