Public want more gardaí in fight against crime

THE public want more gardaí but fewer prison places as their first response to tackling crime.

They also believe drug-addicted criminals need rehabilitation, not imprisonment, and say offenders with psychiatric problems should be accommodated in mental health treatment units instead of jails.

A pre-election poll commissioned by the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) showed that most people greatly overestimated the proportion of inmates in prison for violent offences when prison service records show less than 20% of prisoners are serving time for crimes involving violence.

Even with that misperception, those polled were generally reluctant to see more public money spent on additional prison places. Given a hypothetical crime-busting budget of €10 million, 37% said it would be best spent on extra gardaí, 17% opted for extra youth workers and 15% asked for additional drug treatment places.

A further 7% sought additional community service places and 5% urged more places in mental health treatment programmes. Just 5% opted for the creation of additional prison places as their first choice. The poll also found 66% believed that people came out of prison with worse behaviour than when they went in and that 54% could not agree with the idea that increasing the number of people committed to prison would reduce crime.

IPRT executive director, Rick Lines, said the results showed the main political parties were out of step with voters by selling a “get tough” approach to crime in their campaign promises, particularly as the answers were more or less the same regardless of which political party those polled said they intended voting for.

“Politicians often claim that their calls for ever harsher penalties and ever bigger prisons are based upon public demand for such measures. This research exposes the fallacy of that position,” Mr Lines said.

“A majority of voters are not only supportive of expanded non-custodial and treatment options for dealing with crime; they actually prefer them as a strategy to deal with most people committed to prison each year. It remains to be seen whether the political parties will have the courage to catch up on the electorate in this regard.”

The “Public Attitudes to Prison” poll was carried out by TNS/MRBI in January and found 91% of respondents were either fully or mostly in agreement with the idea that mentally ill offenders needed treatment rather than imprisonment and 81% felt the same about offenders with a drug addiction.

When questioned about the best way of handling young offenders, 74% were in favour of using alternatives to prison while just 17% believed prison was the right approach.

The poll also found that where offenders were not violent, there was strong support for increased use of community service, supervision by probation workers, the use of suspended sentences with conditions attached, and compensation to the victim. Just 24% were in favour of applying mandatory sentences.

www.iprt.ie