We need to invest in improving children’s lives, not monster prisons

IT’S clear already, isn’t it, that it’s going to take quite a while to change the big things.

We elected the new government in that knowledge, I think — some of their rhetoric was a lot more optimistic than any of us believed in our hearts.

And the events of the first few weeks they’ve been in office have proved that.

The terrible, dreadful mess that is our banking system will take years to clean up, even though it seems the right start has been made. I know people who work in banks — who’ve given their whole lives and careers to providing what they see as a valuable service to the community.

Like the rest of us, they feel let down by the mad dash for easy profit that has left an entire system in ruins.

But change will come. I have not the slightest doubt that the steps announced last week are only the start. Over the next couple of months we’re going to see a lot of people leaving senior and lucrative positions in our two main banks, and we’re going to see even more reform of policy and regulation.

What needs to be done can’t be done with a big bang — that much is clear.

But the foolishness of writing the Government off already, as some commentators have been doing, seems to me to be a silly under-estimate of their determination.

Unlike any combination of parties I’ve ever seen in government before, Labour and Fine Gael know they have no choice but to be cohesive and tough for the long haul. And they have to be together — there’s just no room right now for throwing party shapes.

Of course it’s discouraging to realise that there’s no instant or easy solution to the banking crisis. But what’s encouraging is to find a government that already, in its first few weeks, is starting to focus on the kind of change that is possible quickly — and that can make an important difference.

Take Thornton Hall, for instance.

I wrote about it here last October, and I’ve referred to it often. The last time I referred to it, the previous government was in fairly constant session, trying to decide what further cuts they could make in financial supports for vulnerable families.

In that context, I wrote here “Let me make one small suggestion to the people meeting in Government Buildings. If you want to make real savings, immediately and into the future, cancel Thornton Hall. Abandon it right now. Let weeds grow on the site.

In case you don’t know, Thornton Hall is the super-duper prison we’re building in north County Dublin. Nobody knows quite how much it’s going to cost to build — it will be in the hundreds-plus of millions …”

At the time, it was virtually impossible to find out how much the prison might cost. Now, however, thanks to a statement from Justice Minister Alan Shatter, we know how much has been spent so far — €45 million.

Do you know why that’s such a mind-boggling figure? Because every single cent of it has been spent on buying the site and building some roads around it. Not one brick had been put on top of another brick, not one padlock has been bought for a single gate. We’ve been spending money hand over fist for three or four years now, and there is nothing to show for that money.

Except for some drawings, I suppose.

You can still go to the Department of Justice’s website and see a sort of artist’s representation of what the prison will look like (just search Thornton Hall on the website and you’ll find them). If the infamous H-Blocks in Northern Ireland were so called because of the shape of each of the sections of the prison, don’t be too surprised if Thornton Hall becomes known as the X blocks. On paper it looks a bit like something from outer space. No doubt if it ever gets built it will look like any other prison from the outside — high walls, tight security, and no one ever gets to question the efficacy of the place.

Except, thank goodness, the new Minister for Justice, who has announced that he wants to review the whole project. Good for him.

We know what it costs to run a prison. In the past, the Department of Justice has argued in letters to this paper that they expect to get great “economies of scale” from Thornton Hall.

So, they tell us, it will cost less than €100,000 a year to lock someone up there (that’s what it would cost without the economies of scale). But they were proposing to lock up 1,200 people there. Even if they get the costs down to €80,000 a prisoner, that means it will still cost an astronomical sum to run this place if it ever gets built.

In fact it will cost 96 million a year to run Ireland’s new prison. Allowing for the usual waste, that’s a billion a decade.

One billion every ten years – for a country that is so starved of cash that we can’t afford anything. If Minister Shatter asks the Department of Finance to send over the cost benefit analysis that was done before we decided to spend 100 million or so to build a prison that will cost a billion a decade to run, he’ll get another nasty surprise.

There isn’t one. It’s an enormous investment, and no independent study has ever been carried out about whether it’s worth it. Or whether we could do it cheaper, or better.

Or whether huge prisons, with a population the size of a small town, are the right answer anyway. There isn’t a single scrap of paper in the hands of the Government to tell them whether this is a good idea or not.

But as well as knowing how much it’s going to cost to run, we know one other thing. We know who’s going there. Sure, there’ll be a few hardened criminals and a few thugs. There may even be a few white collar chaps.

But the vast majority of the people who will end up in Thornton Hall, at enormous expense to you and me, will be the kids we’re neglecting now.

The ones who leave school early, and unable to read or write. The kids from stigmatised addresses.

The kids who got a pretty lousy start, and whose future is one brush with the law after another.

I reckon Alan Shatter hit the nail on the head when he used the word “scandalous” to describe how Thornton Hall has been developed.

But the real scandal is that we would contemplate spending that kind of money on locking kids up, and not be willing to spend anything on the kind of services that can prevent all that.

We’re always going to need prisons, we know that.

But we’ve never needed a billion euro monstrosity like Thornton Hall. If we were willing to invest a fraction of that in preventative services, in giving kids a better start, we could save ourselves hundreds of millions every decade in new prisons we don’t need to build.