I thank the Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women's Rights for inviting me to speak about the twenty-second report from the NESF on the reintegration of prisoners. Some faces are familiar to me, not least that of Deputy Joe Costello, who has been a long-term member of the forum and has an intense interest in this topic. As the members probably know, the forum's terms of reference, given to it by the Government, give it a focus on equality and social exclusion. That is our remit. It is therefore entirely appropriate, and not before time, for the forum to turn its attention to prisoners, who are among the most disadvantaged people in society and a group that has been marginalised and left outside the social partnership remit until recently.
We started our work on this report at an interesting time for Irish society: the paradox was that the crime rate was dropping while the prison population increased. The members are aware, I am sure, that the imprisonment rate here is one of the highest in the EU - triple that of England and Wales and quadruple that of the Scandinavian countries. They are also aware of the cost of keeping people in prison.
If I may, I would like to make a few personal observations. Throughout the preparation of this report, I was struck by the quite remarkable level of personal commitment and enthusiasm that we encountered in everybody we spoke to and who contributed to this report - the many people who made submissions, the many people who offered their help, the many people and organisations we consulted. This was true of everybody - legal practitioners, statutory agencies, the voluntary groups who work in this area, the staff who work in the Irish Prisons Service, the advocacy groups, the judiciary and the civil servants who have responsibility for offenders and prisoners. I do not wish to single anyone out, but Mr. Justice Moriarty took time off from the Moriarty tribunal to give us his views. That level of commitment and enthusiasm was paralleled everywhere.
The question I asked myself was why there was that level of commitment and interest in an area that was clearly not working. We have a 70% recidivism rate. Clearly prisons are not working, so one would imagine that everybody working in the area would be enormously demoralised. Yet the contrary was the case. The only way I could explain that to myself, which became crystal clear in the course of the consultations, was that despite the fact that everybody knew and was acutely aware that the system was not working, I did not meet one group or one person who did not have a clear idea of what needed to be done. That level of frustration and hope was an important part of the work that needed to be done with regard to prisoners.
Second, people, collectively and individually, were conscious that there was finally a tremendous opportunity to make a go of things in this area, in the sense that wide-ranging reforms have been initiated by the Government in penal reform. I will not go through those because I am sure the members are very aware that the prison building programme is going ahead. Those two things together - that sense that everybody knew a solution was there if we could bring the right confluence of forces together and that this was time to do it - was the only way I could account for the fact that people had such energy and enthusiasm about what looked on the surface to be a pretty intractable problem.
At the core of the report are three central ideas. First, and most important, is our view that the whole point of prison should be the reintegration of prisoners into society as law-abiding and productive citizens. That may sound like a cliché but it is not. What we mean by the whole point of prison is that everything about prison - who goes there, why they are sent there, what happens them day-to-day while they are there, the institutional arrangements we put in place, the prison's business plan, the evaluation of performance of those who run the service, how families are treated, what happens before and after release - in other words, every single aspect of what happens prisoners should have that one unifying aim, namely, to get people out of there and turn them into productive citizens. That coherence in the system is the main thing we are recommending.
The second main idea in the report is based on our discovery that there had been a plethora of excellent reports on prison reform in the last 20 to 30 years, yet the system is still not working. We identified the main problem, which was that although there was no shortage of good ideas, what was lacking was the identification of clear mechanisms by which the change we are recommending could happen. In other words, many people know what needs to be done but they have not quite identified the mechanisms. We hope we have identified those in this report.
The third central idea is that if we are to have real change in this area, the issue of prisoners needs to be brought into the wider remit of social partnership. We were struck by the fact that those who are working and lobbying in the area were themselves marginalised from the endeavour of change that is promoted by social partnership. We thought it was very important that it was brought into that arena, for some very practical reasons. One is that some good models have been devised, for example, for the long-term unemployed and for welfare-to-work, using the social partnership process, that can be applied to this area. The other is that this problem is too big and to critical to be borne by any one section of society. If this is to work we must all be involved in it.
Out of those three ideas we derived some mechanisms. A reintegration group should be set up at national level for strategic purposes, in other words, that a national group should be driving this forward strategically, monitoring and evaluating every single aspect of the system with the reintegration goal in mind. This would then cascade downwards into an interagency steering group, which would be present at each prison level. In other words, the coherence would go from national strategic level down to the actual running of each prison, and that this would be reflected in turn in the business plan of each prison. Members will be familiar with the idea of a business plan and what it means for the evaluation of performance, results etc., and that cascading down from that to the individual level, that each prisoner would have an individually tailored, positive management plan developed by a multidisciplinary chain.
We propose taking the prisoner as he or she comes into the system, making a detailed assessment of needs - including health, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, education, literacy and family support - and devising a plan for that person. The job of the prison system at each level would be to put that plan into operation and monitor it at both individual and prison levels. Each prison should have targets for literacy levels, how much they will improve them and the timeframe within which this will be achieved.
There will be further planned and integrated after-care or post-release services for prisoners. We heard innumerable stories from prisoners, their families and those working in the system about people who did not do badly in prison and, despite the lack of services, seemed to making a fist of their lives only to find they had nowhere to live upon release and the whole thing would fall apart. Those stories were heartbreaking. Accommodation is a key area that must be addressed. It will not, however, be addressed in the context of the current shortage of social housing because in many people's eyes an ex-prisoner's accommodation needs come way below those of everyone else. If we are serious about reintegration, however, this cannot be allowed to happen.
Among our most radical recommendations is that criminal records, bar exceptions relating to public safety concerns, should be expunged after a period and that there should be an ombudsman and a charter of rights for prisoners while they are in prison. There should be a matching of services, with the implementation of the prisoner's rights monitored in the different dimensions. A real prospect should be offered to people that if they meet their own personal goals, and those set for and with them by a multidisciplinary group, there is a long-term prospect that they can expunge their record. We also made complementary recommendations, such as the greater use of non-custodial options and family support.
We are very satisfied with the results so far arising from the publication of the report. Many members of the committee will be aware that significant initiatives have already been put in place. A co-ordination group on prisoner reintegration has been established along the lines we recommended and a director of regimes in the prisons has been appointed, an important step in driving this forward.
There is a plan to establish a working group on positive sentence management. We are also working on the HOS initiative, the multi-agency homeless offenders' strategy, with Dublin City Council. Such initiatives take our recommendations seriously. It is vital that we do not simply produce reports and then disappear, we follow up in a structured way and publish our findings. We go through each of our recommendations after a period and ask Departments and agencies what has been done and publish the results, creating an impetus for the process.
