Prison reports - Crazy cost of keeping inmates

In his first annual report, the Inspector of Prisons and Places of Detention, Judge Michael Reilly, paints an alarming picture of dangerous overcrowding in our jails.

Our prisons are not supposed to be holiday camps, so most people may view the alarm of the report with indifference, but such indifference could be an expensive recipe for future disaster.

The cost of holding prisoners is staggering. The average annual cost of keeping a prisoner in an Irish jail in 2008 was over €92,000, which amounted to a 9% increase on the previous year.

Portlaoise Prison, the country’s sole high security jail, has much higher costs at €155,000 per prisoner per year. This is crazy.

The average cost jumped from €143,000 in 2007, largely as a result of increases in staff salaries due under the national wage agreement.

Mountjoy prison was designed to take 489 prisoners, but the Irish Prison Service (IPS) maintains it has a bed capacity of 573. On February 29, 2008, there were 660 inmates, which meant the jail was housing over one-third more prisoners than it was designed to hold.

In Cork prison the situation was proportionately over twice as bad. It was designed to hold 168 prisoners, but the IPS contends that it has a bed capacity of 282 and it had 308 prisoners on a particular day in February 2008. The overcrowding that day amounted to over 82% of what the prison was designed to hold.

The number of people committed to prison has actually been climbing. It jumped by 13.6% last year. This included a staggering increase of 88.7% in the numbers being committed for non-payment of court fines.

Judge Reilly warned that the overcrowding leads to an “air of tension” in the prisons, puts extreme pressure on the management, as well as prison officers, and could result in violence with “possible serious injury or loss of life”.

Some 22% of the prisons are on protection, often due to gang feuds.

A quarter of the juveniles are on protection, which is a “sad reflection on society,” according to Judge Reilly. Of course, it is an even worse reflection on the prisons themselves, because they are obviously incubating even more serious problems for society when the various prisoners are released.