I was making the point that allied to the question of developing and putting in place a sentencing policy there is the urgent need for the Minister to consider putting in place an on-going educational programme for members of the Judiciary. I say this without any hesitation whatsoever. The members of the Judiciary, and there is absolutely no secret about this, are appointed on a party political basis and on the basis of their allegiance in the past and their service to whatever party are in Government. All of them obviously have very good grounding in the law and they are experienced and competent members of the legal profession, but there is no pre-appointment education. They are simply plucked from the chambers of the professions and appointed to the Bench. There is no educational process leading to their appointment. Once there, they are left to their own devices until they retire at the late age of 65 or 70. None of them is expected or requested to attend courses of education on what is going on in the broader community.
The failure of the system has been manifested time and again, the last most blatant example took place in the days when communities in Dublin and elsewhere were afflicted with a huge heroin problem. When police forces and community groups were attempting to address in their communities the problem of heroin abuse the courts were still handing out suspended sentences to drug traffickers. Quite simply, the message — the seriousness of the problem — had not come home to them. In 1977 we passed the Misuse of Drugs Act which made provision for very serious penalties but a short few years later we had to come back to increase those penalties, from 15 years to life imprisonment for drug trafficking, to try to bring home to the courts the urgent need to deal with drug traffickers in a serious fashion. We have now achieved this, but it took a long number of years to bring home to the Judiciary the extent of the problem, the damage these people were causing and the dangers they were bringing into our communities.
The same in some respects has to be said with regard to crimes of sexual abuse and rape. The fact that in 1989 a judge of the Circuit Court would feel it appropriate in whatever circumstances to impose a suspended sentence on a person who had raped an 11 year old child and left that child psychologically damaged is a feature of a Judiciary totally out of touch with what is happening on the ground and in particular with regard to what we as a community expect of our Judiciary in trying to address what I believe is only most recently understood and exposed by the activities of people working in the field of sexual abuse, the major extent and problem of these crimes in Ireland. Therefore, education is central and important.
The fourth aspect highlighted by recent developments is the question of sentencing, the question of what do we do with the offender. The point has been made very succinctly in some editorials recently that we lock people up and put them in prison as punishment, not for punishment, but there is a strong and cogent case made that those convicted of sexual offences — the type we are addressing in this legislation — and sentenced, are in need of more than mere punishment and incarceration. This issue has been raised through the Probation and Welfare Officers Branch of the UPTCS. The case they make is for the establishment, as a universal feature of all sentences to be imposed on sexual offenders, of a proper regime of psychiatric and psychological assessment and treatment. I sent their submission to the Minister by way of letter of 12 December 1988. I wish to read that letter because I think this is an essential and important aspect of this legislation. The issue was raised by the Probation and Welfare Service and not only in their submission to the Minister. They had, on a voluntary basis and on their own initiative started two pilot projects, one in Mountjoy and one in Arbour Hill, borrowing on their own good time and initiative to provide pilot schemes for sexual offenders in both those institutions. Building on their experiences there and their contacts internationally, they made a submission to the Minister in which they made the case that the Department and the Minister in particular must act in the area of establishing, as a feature of our prison service, psychiatric and psychological services for sexual offenders, making the point that not to do so would simply mean putting these people back on the streets, if anything worse off than when they went in on the first day of their sentence.
The case was raised subsequently at a conference under the heading "Alternatives to Custody" held in Dublin on 7 and 8 April 1988, which the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Deputy Vincent Brady, attended. The association brought together many experts in the field and discussed over those two days the whole issue of alternatives to custody and highlighted in papers — presented particularly by Mr. Ray Wyer, at the time director of the Gracewell Clinic treatment centre in Birmingham for sexual offenders and himself a former probation officer — the case for the treatment of offenders of a sexual nature once incarcerated.
As I said, I wrote to the Minister in 1988 asking him to address this matter in the context of the Bill which had then been in circulation in the Seanad. I wish to quote in brief. Referring to the Bill I stated:
In general, The Workers' Party is happy with the content of the Bill and will be supporting the main thrust of the Bill when it reaches the Dáil. However, there is one area not covered by the Bill, which I would ask you to consider at this stage with a view to introducing an appropriate amendment or addition to the Bill or undertaking to consider amendment of related legislation to cover the issue.
I understand that you have received a submission and representations from the Probation and Welfare Officer Branch of the Union of Public & Technical Civil Servants (UPTCS). This touches directly upon the treatment afforded to sexual offenders once in prison and the total absence of any ongoing supervision, once released. I have spoken with Anthony Cotter, the Press Officer of the Branch, and Anna Ryan both of whom are directly involved in an innovative and pilot scheme for the treatment of sexual offenders at Arbour Hill; a similar project has recently been initiated at Mountjoy Prison. In short, the Probation and Welfare Officer Service is convinced that the problems and needs of sexual offenders are unique and require intensive care, confrontation and treatment while in custody, combined with continued supervision and assessment on release after sentence, unlicence or under other order. Having considered their submission and listened to their arguments, The Workers' Party would be disposed to their view. We feel that the opportunity of the current Bill is an important time to address this issue, as it is not anticipated that there will be further amending legislation in this area for some considerable time.
I would therefore be anxious if you might please consider the matter in full and for these purposes, I enclose a copy of the submission of the Service for easy reference. It is hoped that you might be in a position to respond favourably to their views and consider the drafting of appropriate provisions for inclusion in this Bill when it arrives in the Dáil for discussion.
I await hearing from you in response and thank you in anticipation.
That was a letter of 12 December 1988, and I apologise in part for reading it at length. I did so because to date I have not received even an acknowledgement let alone an answer. The Minister, I suppose, if not in deference to a Member of the House in correspondence, at least in response to the submission that had been forwarded to him by the union, sought to address this matter on Second Stage when opening the debate on the Bill. Indeed, he did not do so himself; Deputy Woods was asked to read his speech for him. I have not got his speech as reported in the Official Report but in the text as delivered and circulated in the House under the heading "General" he said, before going on to discuss the provisions of the Bill itself, that he was aware that several Deputies of the 25th Dáil raised the question of the treatment of sexual offenders but that this was a separate matter and outside the scope of the Bill. He went on to say that programmes which had been carefully monitored were already under way in our prisons on the treatment of sexual offenders and, subject to the availability of resources, those which proved resourceful would be continued, and where appropriate extended. He said that the Bill was confined to reforming the law on sexual assault offences and to provisions which related to trials of such offences. It did not purport to deal with the prevention or detection of such crimes; these were separate issues. The speech went on to make reference to the Criminal Justice (Forensic Evidence) Bill as an aspect of what the Minister is doing in an attempt to detect crime. I find utterly and totally ridiculous and unacceptable such response by any Minister concerned actively with this area of the law. To suggest that the Bill is not about the detection and prevention of crimes in this area means the Minister misunderstands totally what the Bill is about. It means he does not know what he is talking about.
The Bill is explicitly designed to deal with the prevention and detection of crime. How does it do so? It proposes to redefine the crimes involved. It proposes to deal with the rules of evidence dealing with the conduct of trials in these cases. What is the purpose of these features if they are not to deal with the detection or the prevention of such crime?
To suggest that the question of sentencing is separate as an issue from the general thrust of this Bill is insulting, in particular to those people who have voluntarily worked to establish these schemes within the prisons. The Minister has taken them on board in the context of his delivery on Second Stage, suggesting that they are official departmental developments. In fact, they were pushed on the Department by people working in the field who were concerned about the inaction of the Department, who decided themselves that they should of their own volition, on their own initiative and in their own time, establish pilot schemes of work in this area, and the Minister suggests they are being carefully monitored. He does not even acknowledge in the course of his address exactly who had thought of these schemes, had put them in place and were working them. He gives us the impression they were departmentally contrived and established. They were not, and he is being dishonest in his remarks to the House, but he is being completely disingenuous in suggesting he can cast this whole area of debate and issue aside by suggesting that they have no relevance to this Bill. They are totally relevant to the Bill.
The point I made in my letter to the Minister some 13 months ago is that it will be a long day again before we come back to address this area of the law and that this is the only opportunity that this Minister will have during his term of office, however long that may be — and I hope it will be as long as the Minister wishes it to be — to address the question of sentencing and the conditions of the sentence once imposed. Consequently, it is criminally irresponsible of him to walk away from the Second Stage debate on this Bill and merely try to suggest that the conditions of sentencing have no part to play in the context of the legislation. It is essential that the Minister address this point. His fobbing off and throwing the issue aside is utterly unacceptable and in fact raises grave questions about his commitment and that of his Department to address the problems seriously.
Sentencing is directly addressed in the Bill. Sentences are being increased for certain redefined offences, and if that is so why can we not address the issue of sentencing and the conditions and terms of sentences once imposed? From examining the submission of the probation and welfare service of the Department the reasons that they must be linked become absolutely clear. I will quote briefly from their submission to help me make the point that it is not simply good enough to talk about how long we lock people up for sexual offences, but how we deal with them in prison is as important as the length of their sentence. I will quote from a policy document prepared by the Probation and Welfare Officers. Under the heading "Community Safety, Treatment and Punishment", they say:
The use of punishment without treatment/counselling must be regarded as short sighted. Research and those who have experience of working with sex offenders inform us that convicted sex offenders would often have committed other similar offences apart from the ones for which they were convicted in Court. They also inform us that sex offending is a learned behaviour and unless it is unlearned the possibility of re-offending on release from prison is very high.
Surely that is an argument for prevention, but the Minister says he does not want to deal with it. The submission continues:
However most sex offenders are released back into the community without having undergone a systematic treatment counselling programme. We feel——
that is, the Probation and Welfare officers——
the time is opportune to change this situation and establish systematic programmes for sex offenders in our prison system.
I agree with the submission for the reasons I have outlined. The time is opportune. There is no more relevant time than the present when we are debating the Criminal Law (Rape) (Amendment) Bill, 1988, to address this issue. The Minister must ensure before this Bill passes into law that there is a provision that makes it obligatory on the prison service to subject all persons sentenced to terms of imprisonment for sexual offences to undergo a regime of psychiatric and psychological assessment and treatment and that they then be subject to on-going treatment on licence once released at the end of the term of sentence to ensure that the very high risk of re-offending as discussed in the submission is addressed and dealt with effectively. Under the heading "After Prison — Supervision and Support", it is suggested in the submission that:
In addition to the prison programme we strongly recommend the setting up by the Probation Service of a structured supervision and after-care programme for sex offenders on their release from prison. When released, sex offenders need ongoing supervision and counselling so that they have to continue to face the reality of their offence, avoid re-offending and reintegrate into society.
Under the heading "Community Based Supervision", in cases of child molestation and incest, where non-custodial sentences might be imposed — let us face it, they occur unfortunately all too often — the submission states:
In these cases we recommend community based statutory supervision and counselling as the appropriate disposal. Indeed an extended (up to five years) statutory Probation/Supervision Order might be a more appropriate sentencing option than a short prison sentence, especially for some cases of incest, child molestation and paedophilia.
Again in seeking to draw at some length from the submission I want to illustrate for the purposes of this debate that the people working in the field have made a clear and succinct proposition of what should be done in a concise submission to the Minister. For the Minister to come in here on Second Stage and with a wave of the hand say that the issue is not to be addressed by this Bill and has nothing to do with this Bill is completely and utterly contemptible and unacceptable. The basis and need for this approach was addressed in a two-day conference in April 1988 convened by an organising committee comprising people working in the service in Ireland, and also involved those working in the prison and welfare service in Northern Ireland. The main speakers included a Minister of State in the present Government, Dr. Ken Whitaker, the chairman of the review committee on the prison service, whose report in 1985 has been assiduously ignored since then and a very important contributor, Mr. Ray Wyre, who works in a special unit for the treatment of sexual offenders in Birmingham, England. He delivered a very useful paper underlining the research and reasons behind the approach now being sought by the Probation and Welfare service here. In the context of the potential of an offender to re-offend, he said that the sexual offender is not someone who can be easily stereotyped and thrown into a cast of their own. In the booklet Crime in Ireland: Alternatives to Custody Mr. Wyre states on page 23:
The one thing about the offenders whom I worked with is that they came from every class and background, more so than any other criminal group. He can be a teacher, unemployed, a police-man, clergyman. Some of the offenders I am presently working with, (who are nearly all probation clients), are a head teacher, a barrister, a watchmaker, an electronics engineer, the owner of a security firm, two retired men, a waiter and two men who are presently unemployed.
He continues:
Some of you who heard me talk the last time, heard me give the New York figures, but I just want to repeat them again. In one study that was done of the New York Psychiatric Institute in New York City, 411 men admitted they had committed offences against 138, 137 — 232 child molesters had molested 117,585 children, and 89 rapists had raped 744 women.
He went on to explain that studies in England where he worked showed comparable statistics. Given the socio-economic climate in Ireland there is no reason to doubt that the pattern is any different here. The point he is making is that which has been made in the submission from the welfare service, that this type of offence is a condition that is learned and, once acquired, is of pathological dimensions.
Mr. Wyre referred to three clients, all of whom had been punished and sent to prison but all of whom came out of prison exactly the same as they went in, simply because nothing was done with them when they were in prison. That is exactly the situation that exists in our prison service for the vast majority of sexual offenders, except for those who are lucky to come under the two pilot schemes established by the initiative of the Probation and Welfare Service which the Minister now says he is carefully monitoring for his own purposes.
Mr. Wyre goes on to say:
In identifying the problem as I would see it, I want us to remember the following: firstly, that many types of sex offending are extremely addictive, once you get into it, it is incredibly difficult to get out of it. Second we are not looking at cure, we are looking at control, everybody in this room——
it equally applies to this Chamber here today——
——controls their sexuality, you don't get cured of it you are actually involved in controlling it. You might not break the law if you let those controls go, but you would get into a hell of a mess. With regard to your present relationships we are all into controlling sexuality and in a sense that is what I am going to attempt to do with the offender.
What we are talking about is identifying a problem. We are not talking about cure but about the fact that the problem can be controlled from within the prison and also outside it once the offender has been released into the community. Mr. Wyre goes on to say:
As I said before sex offending is not spontaneous, it is part of a cycle of behaviour that one can identify and therefore one can seek to control it. What then is presently being done with regard to sex offenders either in prison or in the community? On the whole it is a very simple answer — nothing.
When referring to sex offenders Mr. Wyre says:
As a society we would actually rather have these men in the community in secret, in bed-sit land somewhere rather than going through some form of programme in a hostel because nobody wants the hostel in their street. The fact is that we are actually placing sex offenders in the most vulnerable part of society, we are putting them into bed-sits, the other occupants are often single parents with children and yet we still carry on exposing this vulnerable group to high risks because we will not face up to the problem that the majority of sex offenders are in the community.
Mr. Wyre goes on:
We need to know right from the assessment stage that even if he goes to prison he is going to be in the community in a relatively short time; we must recognise this and actually do something about it. When an offender is in prison, we need to set up within the regimes something that would look at how he normalises, justifies and excuses, and examine the addictive behaviour of his offending.
Those are the reasons advanced by Mr. Wyre in his contribution, a contribution, I have no doubt, that was fully reported back to the Minister in due course by his officials and people who attended that conference. Those are the reasons borrowed by the Probation and Welfare Service when they made their submission to the Minister over two years ago. Those are the reasons that prompted me in December to put before the Minister a very specific request, that he would address the need to put in place on a statutory basis a scheme of sentencing and treatment of offenders once sentenced. I find it utterly contemptible of the Minister first that he has never acknowledged or indeed answered the correspondence I sent to him and that he has failed utterly to respond to or even acknowledge the existence of the submission made to him by the Probation and Welfare Service. In his speech he suggested that the issue had been raised with him by several Deputies in the 25th Dáil. There was no reference to the prison service, who had made submissions to him. Most importantly, it is contemptible of him that he has not indicated that he would work in this House to introduce a new section or an amendment to the existing law to deal with the problem. He did not even indicate that he is prepared to consider that it is a matter for amending legislation or for putting on a statutory basis the need for such a service in our prisons.
I acknowledge I have gone on at length about this issue but I have done so simply because I believe it is important to put on the record on this occasion, as broadly as possible, that this Minister has been equipped with all the arguments, the reasons and the research to act in this area, lest the message might go out that perhaps it is some new-fangled idea that had been thought up by individuals within the service or by a few Deputies in the 25th Dáil and that really there was not a central or core issue at hand. There is, and it is this. Sentencing and the conditions under which sentences are imposed are central to this Bill and, more importantly, are central to the way in which we would hope to try to address the problem of sexual offending in our community, a problem which, as I have said, has been totally exposed and the extent of which we are beginning to wake up to as it affects women and young children and family life in Ireland. For that reason it is an issue that I and The Workers' Party are not going to treat lightly in the context of this Bill. If the Minister is not prepared to bring in an amendment we will put one down and I hope the people on the Opposition benches who are concerned with this legislation will join with us to try to make the Minister see reason in this matter.
Moving to the provisions of this Bill——