Our prison system remains in crisis
LAST week’s capital spending announcements may have finally sounded the death knell for the proposed prison development at Thornton Hall, but where does this leave the prison system? It may be that, in abandoning the prison expansion policies of the Celtic Tiger era, the Government will now be forced to address the underlying problems within Irish penal policy that caused the overcrowding crisis in the first place.
Conceived at the height of the construction craze, the proposed super prison project at Thornton Hall was bedevilled by controversy from the outset, not least regarding the elevated price paid for the site. From a penal policy perspective, the greater scandal was the scale of what it was proposed to build at Kilasallaghan, north Co Dublin. It was a prison far greater than anything seen before in Ireland and among the largest in Europe, with up to 2,200 prisoners to be held in a complex of prison units, housing male, female and possibly even juvenile prisoners, as well as immigration detainees.
