It is clear that previous attempts to prevent suicides in prisons have, tragically, not succeeded. The tragic death last Sunday of a young man in St. Patrick's Institution was the fourth in as many months and the second case of suicide by a prisoner remanded in custody.
The number of prisoners on remand is rising rapidly, primarily due to intolerable delays caused by archaic criminal procedures and something as fundamental as the paucity of the number of judges. The Courts and Court Officers Act was passed last December, yet the Minister for Justice has still to fill the existing vacancies for eight Circuit Court judges. The net result of the Minister's failure to act, because of her inability to convince the Minister for Finance of the urgency of the problem, is that trial dates for prisoners on remand are now being put back for a further three months.
In the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court it is now a weekly occurrence for cases whose date for trial has come to be put back to February 1997. This means it is taking up to 15 months from the date of the offence for accused persons to be tried. When this delay is allied to the two year delay for rape and murder trials in the Central Criminal Court, one can see that the system of criminal procedure is quickly being reduced to a shambles. In May 1996, there were 18 murder and 46 rape cases on the Central Criminal Court list. Fifty-one of these cases were withdrawn without a trial date being fixed. In the Bar Council journal, the Bar Review, an editorial dated June 1996 stated: “The problem has been identified and the solutions suggested. Only the political will to implement the reforms is awaited.”
It can be adjudged that since the Minister for Justice cannot get the fundamentals right, it is difficult to see how she can get more complex issues right. While there can be little excuse for the Minister's inactivity in the area of court procedure, there can be none for not implementing practical measures to minimise the risk of suicides among our prison population. It should be the norm that information on sentenced prisoners and those remanded in custody is available. At present, the only information available about a new prisoner is that outlined on the legal warrant, with whatever information the prisoner chooses to provide. This presents a serious difficulty for prison staff.
A proper medical and psychiatric assessment process prior to imprisonment should be implemented without delay. Further, the transfer of prisoners in Wheatfield Prison to other prisons to make way for those remanded in custody would amount to the pragmatic and inexpensive establishment of a remand centre, which is clearly badly needed. The risk of incarcerating prisoners on remand with habitual criminals cannot be underestimated. This applies to young people in particular.
The Minister must rise to the challenge and conduct a root and branch analysis of the reason for the number of tragic deaths in our prisons. The statement by the Minister that it should come as no surprise that a rise in the number of suicides in society should be reflected in the rise in the number of suicides in prisons displays a breathtaking lack of compassion and is reminiscent of the ambivalence which she displays when addressing other areas in her brief. When addressing the issue of suicide in prison, the Minister is speaking about human life and glib, secondhand excuses to get the Minister off the hook represent a sad indictment of the inadequacy of her philosophy.