McDowell called upon by experts not to privatise prisons
The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) is leading the campaign, backed by 15 experts in the area.
“We will be sending an open letter to the justice minister, signed by leading criminologists, lecturers and human rights activists, expressing our opposition to prison privatisation,” said IPRT executive director Rick Lines.
The move follows comments last week by prison bosses that privatisation of prisons could not be ruled out.
Director General Sean Aylward is currently completing proposals for the minister for justice outlining his options following the collapse of talks on ending the 60 million annual overtime bill.
The options include closure of some prisons and privatisation of prison services, such as escorts, and possibly even of prisons.
Mr Aylward said: “I am not excluding it as an option. You hear claims that private prisons are horrific. There are good private prisons and bad private prisons.
“There is no reason to believe that if we went down the track of privately-run prisons that they’d be bad. Why should they be?”
He said many states in Australia, Britain and some of the progressive states in the US had some of the best prisons there were, and they were private. But he said the final decision lay with the Minister.
Mr Lines said the IPRT had major concerns about privatisation.
“Privatisation is shown to be a failure everywhere it is tried. We are concerned as to why the justice minister and the prison service are even looking at the policy.”
He said privately-run prisons were supposed to be more cost effective and more efficiently run.
“There is little evidence or no evidence that they try and prevent or reduce prisoner recidivism and there is inconclusive evidence they are more cost effective.”
He said a major US study showed assaults on prison officers by prisoners were 50% higher in private prisons, while prisoner-on-prisoner violence was 66% higher.
Mr Lines said privatisation of prisons reflected a failure of policy.
“You are turning prisons over to the corporate sector.
“The only way they can run a profit is if they are full. So you are turning over justice policy to the corporate sector and putting corporate interests ahead of public interests. You will get an increase in incarceration, not a reduction in prison use.”
Last October, official figures showed that Scotland’s only private prison had the worst disciplinary record of any jail in the country.
A report, based on figures supplied by the Scottish Prison Service, showed that the private prison in Kilmarnock, run by Premier Prisons, had 3,634 disciplinary offences in the year 2001-02.
That was twice the number in Barlinnie prison, which had double the population as Kilmarnock.
The open letter to the minister will be read out at an IPRT press conference on Wednesday.
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