Look to Nordic nations for prison guidance

JUSTICE Minister Dermot Ahern’s blase attitude to “doubling up” in prison cells shows a significant reversal in policy aspirations.

Yet, it does match the very serious decline in regime standards in Irish prisons in recent years.

When the Whitaker Committee examined the Irish penal system in 1985, they stipulated single-cell accommodation as an essential requirement.

The Council of Europe’s European Prison Rules likewise insists on this standard. The Department of Justice, under a predecessor of Mr Ahern’s, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, envisaged the elimination of the relatively small degree of cell-sharing then occurring in their policy document, The Management of Offenders, in 1994.

Since the mid-1990s, our prison population has more than doubled to over 4,200. With this escalation has come a deterioration in regimes.

Most men and women in prison (about 60%) must now share cells. Nearly all of these must defecate and urinate in each other’s presence. Prisoners eat their meals in confined, unhygienic and undignified spaces.

Prisons, almost invariably, are detrimental to people to some degree, and poor conditions worsen this damage. In Ireland, exceptionally high lock-up times compound the problem.

Cell arrangements in our prisons facilitate bullying and abuse, and the drug problem within prisons.

Thornton Hall and other recent developments in Irish prisons derive from backward penal attitudes and policies drawn from the US and Britain, though there are signs of rethinking in Britain, as exemplified this summer by Kenneth Clarke.

If we looked for guidance instead to Nordic countries, we would have far fewer in prison, and prison conditions would be far less destructive.

Dr Kevin Warner

Co-ordinator of Prison Education 1979-2009

Kilgarron Hill

Enniskerry

Co Wicklow