Do we really need a new prison that will cost over €100m a year to run?

THERE was an American senator one time who said “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re looking at big money”.

I sometimes feel that’s the world we’ve started to live in here. Public policy decisions are made every day that cost millions, sometimes tens of millions, and they’re never debated in any real sense.

A government that can set out to cause hardship and misery at the expense of, say, Hepatitis C sufferers can casually decide to spend €100 million on one public policy decision, and we’re never really told anything about it.

How is that possible, you say. Surely €100m a year has to be debated and justified, doesn’t it? It all depends on where you start. Just take this little figure, for example — €83,800.

That’s how much, officially, it costs per annum to keep a person in jail.

The figure dates from 2004 and is due to be updated soon, probably to around €90,000 a year. Even at the 2004 rates, it’s not cheap, is it? It’s €230 a night. That’s about two-and-a-half times what they’re charging for a room and breakfast in the very nice Jury’s Inn across the road from where I work. But how can a figure like that add up to over €100m?

Read on.

In 2004, the average daily population in our prisons was just about 3,200. Quite a few of those were detained in prison under our immigration laws, their principal offence being their nationality or skin colour (altogether 946 non-Irish people were detained under immigration laws that year).

It would have been cheaper to put them up in a good hotel. But who were the rest of the prisoners? I think it would be useful to know a bit about them since we’re about to spend an arm and a leg on a new prison that will have the capacity to lock up another 1,200 people.

That prison, if it were full to capacity, would enable the daily prison population to be increased by nearly half. But of course it is intended that the new prison will replace Mountjoy (which accommodates around 900 prisoners), and the enormous extra cost involved will therefore result in an increase in capacity of around one quarter.

There is, of course, a very considerable controversy around the cost and value of the proposed new prison at Thornton Hall in north Co Dublin. We know that the State, on the basis of what seems like a very cursory process, paid around €30m for the site alone, and that construction of the new prison and supporting infrastructure is going to cost many tens of millions before it’s done.

Fascinating though that controversy is, I think there are other, more fundamental questions to be asked. Do we need it? And if we do, is this the right place to put it? Because if my calculator is correct, and we fill Thornton Hall with 1,200 prisoners, that will cost €100,560,000 a year to run, using the Prison Service’s own estimates.

Of course there’ll be savings from the sale of Mountjoy. But here’s a public policy decision that’s going to cost over €100 million a year in today’s money, and that cost is going to be incurred every year into the foreseeable future. The running of that one prison will cost a billion a decade. And there’s almost no public debate about it, no challenge, no open enquiry as to whether we really need to spend that money, no justification of the enormous costs involved. It ought to be easy enough for anyone with an open mind to dispose of one of the major questions. Thornton Hall is simply the wrong place to build a prison like this.

The new prison, if it ever sees the light of day, will be Ireland’s main place of detention. And even though the proposed location is not that far from Dublin, as the crow flies, you only have to drive around it to realise that it represents infrastructural nonsense to build it out there.

It will employ 1,000 people or more, all of whom will become long-distance commuters in an area with little or no public transport. The consequences for prisoners and families will be disastrous. In fact, there is an unconscious irony in the approach that the Prison Service has taken to this whole issue.

As part of its statement of ‘core values’ the Prison Service commits to helping prisoners, “where possible and appropriate, to maintain relationships with their families, (and) “commits itself to minimising the detrimental effects of imprisonment”.

But in a press release defending the purchase of Thornton Hall, it is described as “away from any large population centre, town or village” and the Prison Service admits it will have to “envisage providing shuttle transport to the campus”.

The main question, though, is do we really need a prison costing a billion euro a decade? Who will be in it? Are there that many drug barons, lifers, dangerous criminals?

WELL, oddly enough, no. In the most recent annual report of the Prison Service they pick a “snapshot day” — December 3, 2004.

On that day there were 2,660 prisoners in custody, of whom 193 were serving a life sentence — that’s just over 7% of the prison population. About one in every seven prisoners, including the lifers, was serving a sentence of 10 years or more — the vast majority (though not all) of them were for crimes involving violence. On the other hand, exactly two-thirds of all prisoners were in jail for five years or less. Some of these shorter sentences were also for crimes involving violence, but a significant majority of the people in jail on the snapshot day had committed no violence whatever. A quarter of the prison population (685) were serving sentences of a year or less.

I’m not arguing here that only people who commit violence should go to jail. But any sense of perspective on this issue ought surely to require us to think long and hard about whether and why we need super-jails.

Rick Lines, executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, makes another point. He has argued that the profile of crime and offending in Ireland — and the huge cost of incarceration — makes us a jurisdiction with great potential for the use of non-custodial sanctions as a means of reducing the prison population.

Unfortunately, he said this potential is currently under-valued, under-developed, under-resourced and under-utilised. The degree of that under-development was highlighted last year by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on the Probation and Welfare Service. That report found that “the cost of imposing a community-based sentence is significantly less than the cost of the alternative imprisonment term”.

It’s certainly bound to be a lot less than a billion euro a decade. It’s hard to believe that ten years hence we’ll be looking back at the phenomenal costs of a new super-prison when we have the chance now to say, hang on a minute. Just for once, can we see the case for this before we spend the money?