I move:
That Seanad Éireann welcomes the enlightened and practical prison reforms proposed in the Whitaker Committee report, and calls on the Government to implement the report as a matter of urgency.
I am privileged to move this motion on behalf of the Labour Party, noting the report of the Whitaker Committee. I want to put on record the gratitude, not only of Members of the House but of all those interested over the years in prison reform, to Dr. Whitaker and members of the committee and to those who contributed to the information appendices to the main body of the report.
I recall the establishment of the Whitaker Committee. On that occasion I recall, as a member of the MacBride Committee of Inquiry into the Penal System in Ireland, criticising the narrowness of the terms of reference particularly the omission from the terms of reference of the causes of crime. The Minister, when replying, said he felt that we had a difference of opinion and that investigation of the causes of crime in Britain, one Royal Commission after another, had not been conclusive. My reply to him on that occasion was that this was not necessarily so and that we had begun to learn a great deal more about crime. I am pleased to see that the Minister's injunction to the new members of the committee on that occasion, that they should interpret the terms of reference generously, was taken up by the members of the committee. What we have before us is a very important document. It was produced very quickly by the committee. I would also like to pay tribute to the secretariat who worked with Dr. Whitaker and the committee.
If I have a quibble with the report — in the popular press reports reference was made to its length, its 360 pages complete with bibliography — it is that in some places it had to compress literature that is very large into a rather short space. I have some sympathy for the committee in this regard.
I am very conscious of the fact that the committee went about their work at a time that was a very difficult. We were in the middle of what I can only describe as a crime panic. I do not want to weary the Seanad by repeating arguments that I have placed on the record previously, but there is a distinction between two things — the real rate of crime and the perceived rate of crime. Intervening between the real rate of crime and the perceived rate of crime are all the different influences that affect public perception. Thus, for example, if there is too much sensational coverage given to attacks on the elderly it creates a sense of fear among the elderly who previously were not afraid. One has to draw a distinction. This is not to say that attacks on the elderly should not be reported or indeed that the punishment of those involved in such despicable crimes should not be reported. However, there is a distinction between what the public perceives to be the crime rate and what the real rate is.
The beginning of the report adverts to the problem of assessing the rate of crime. The rate of crime has increased. The report was probably drawing on the very valuable experience that Dr. David Rothman of the Economic and Social Research Institute brought to the committee. The major changes in crime in the 1960s are probably that it shifted from being a rural to an urban phenomenon, that the pattern of violence in murder has changed and that there has been an increase in property-related crimes. Of course, there is more property, there are more motor vehicles and there is an increase in population in the urban areas. Therefore, when one is talking about crime waves one has to allow for all of these factors.
The atmosphere in which the committee began their work — and the Labour Party welcome the report of the committee and urge the Government to implement their report — is well summed up in an Irish Independent leader of 9 August 1985. It begins:
The first whispers of the conclusions of the Committee of Inquiry into the Penal System have begun circulating. They are bound to fuel the debate, which is always live, about the purpose of prisons and penal systems.
The information available suggests that the system should concentrate more on finding alternative forms of punishment for people convicted in courts — such as community service for example. Remission should be increased from a quarter to one-third of the sentence. New prisons would cost a fortune to build so let's spend the money on the alternative forms. And the parties involved in the row between the P.O.A. and the Department of Justice should sort themselves out.
Perhaps the public's eye will be caught by the suggestions that what seems to be a milder regime for prisoners should be encouraged. And this is where the sparks will fly.
A public which feels itself threatened by violence and which is also sickened by it will always want some form of punishment for the offenders. The Committee apparently believes that community service would fit the crime in many instances. The public — or a large part of it — may well argue that this is a very soft reply to men and women who have broken the law, is no encouragement to Gardaí to catch criminals and is certainly no deterrent to people who have taken to crime as a way of life.
Encapsulated in that leader is the view that was readily being created and disseminated in this country at the time the Whitaker Committee began their work. It had a number of forms — distort the true rate of crime, sensationalise crime and continually build and build more moral panic and fear in the community so as to make the case for the harsh option in relation to responding to crime rather then the softer option.
I want to challenge an assumption that the Irish Independent makes on behalf of all of us. A public which feels itself threatened by violence, and which is also sickened by it, will always want some form of punishment for the offenders. Is that not the nub of the matter? When I was serving on the MacBride Commission, we debated this issue of the purpose of prison. Many want people sent to prison for different reasons. Should it be a matter of punishment or retribution? Should it be revenge? Should it be rehabilitation? Interviewers frequently ask the victims of crimes and their near relatives “what would you like to happen to this person”? The person in an emotional moment might say something and it is carried in the papers, and so on. What is the motivation one might ask? I object to a newspaper suggesting that there is in the public this ungenerous attitude towards people who commit crimes. I think it can be created. I think it can be whipped up; it can be fanned.
Imprisonment is a very difficult concept to understand when you look back at the Irish history of the prison system. The Irish prison system is relatively short in history. Like many of our other problems, deportation was available for a long time, so we did not have prisons. People were either executed, mutilated or deported. Indeed, many of the buildings which the Whitaker Committee describe in a very interesting set of photographs, which are in the report from page 148 to 178, show the kind of institution that they had to review. It looks at toilets in Mountjoy Prison on page 149; it looks at other modern ones in page 150. Basically, in those 30 pages you get an impression of the institutional provision that was inherited by this State and which is totally inadequate. It was one of the terms of reference that they look at the conditions. They have done us a service in drawing attention to them.
I would like to say, as a preliminary to the recommendations of the Labour Party, that for the record, the Labour Party have an old association with prison reform. It was in the Thirties that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions asked the Parliamentary Labour Party to establish a group to look at conditions in prisons. That group was appointed, with young Jim Larkin serving as secretary. They presented their first report on prisons in Ireland in the modern period, prisons and prisoners. What is very important to bear in mind is that there have been difficulties in looking at the prison service up to now. It has been bedevilled by secrecy. It has been very difficult to conduct proper research on prisons. That is my personal view. It has been very difficult to conduct research on prisoners. The argument for that is that you were invading their constitutional rights if you, in fact, interviewed them after they left prison. It has been very difficult to assemble case histories of the experience of prison. It has been very difficult altogether to put together life histories of the effects of prison.
I was worried by some of the newspaper reactions. I only quoted one newspaper, although there was another newspaper, The Irish Times, which welcomed the Whitaker report. I think it was right to do that. Of course, the Whitaker report was welcomed by the Prison Officers' Association, the Prisoners' Rights Association, with some reservations, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, the Labour Party, The Workers' Party and members of the Probation and Welfare Service. A number of bodies welcomed it. The people to whom the editorial I quoted refer are people who have very little conception of what prison is about. The deprivation of liberty is the main effect of imprisonment: one is not free to take decisions.
The history of prisons all over the world, as the historians of prisons tell us, shows that, first of all, the prisoner's time is not controlled by himself, his access to space is not controlled by himself and his body is not controlled by himself. That was the purpose originally of convict uniforms. It is the purpose for the retention of basic elementary potting out ceremonies in prisons long after other reforms have been introduced. The prisoner loses the right to make basic decisions in freedom. He loses certain rights to make certain decisions in relation to his essential privacy and in relation to the integrity of his person. The very fact of imprisonment is in itself something that has to be faced by society as to whether it is an appropriate response or not.
I hold the personal opinion that imprisonment is an incredibly inhuman response to problems in many ways and is very much in the short term something of a last resort. I welcome the recommendation in the Whitaker Committee's report that prison sentences should be shortened if possible, that non-custodial alternatives should be developed to the maximum and that, where possible, there should be a review of sentences when they go over a certain period. I think that these proposals are all welcome and I think that they will be welcomed.
I would like to say more about the world of prison. I visited a prisoner who was mentioning to me the basic aspects of being in prison, of not knowing the changes in the seasons of the year and the limited space to which you had access. There is one last contextual reference I will make. When Pentonville was opened the industrialists of Britain gathered for the official opening. They marvelled that, at the pull of a lever, so many doors could be opened and that there could be so much control of so many human beings. It was almost like clockwork.
The question that faces us in the end is: what is the purpose of prison? There is a debate going on in this country. It needs to be quashed right now. Many of the people who end up in prison have already been very bruised by society in terms of their background. I want to draw a distinction immediately here. An illogical proposition has been put up every time in the last 12 years I have been in public life when I have spoken on the subject of penal reform. I have said that when you take the unemployment rate and the rate of social deprivation in different areas you will notice a correspondence between them and the rate of imprisonment. I have never said that one's background makes one a criminal. There is a connection between the two rates — in other words, between the rate of the predisposing factors and of the actual crime rate itself. Of course, individuals make the choice about what they will do between the incidents of crime. It never gets clarified. People always turn around and say to me "I suppose it was his background that made him do that". But background is important.
One of the most challenging findings that is coming out of this report, as of others, is the close predictive ability between those who are in institutions for juveniles, for example, who have been offenders and those who have been non-offenders. The mere fact of institutionalisation, which itself is related to unemployment, homelessness and poor backgrounds in many cases, is as good a predictive factor in the non-criminal setting as it is a fact of the criminal setting. One has to look at it like that.
There are a number of important questions that arise immediately. I think one of the most important chapters in the report is chapter 3, "Society and Crime", which invites us to debate how society views crime. There is a Durkheimian notion at one stage in the report where it more or less argues about the causes of crime and states that the purpose of society is more or less to reproduce itself and that society must deal with its offenders in a particular way. I am not sure that that is the project of people like myself. It certainly is not to reproduce the existing society uncritically the way it is.
That raises another question. The hysteria in that group of newspapers to which I referred earlier is entirely directed at the control of society. It is not directed at understanding society. I have spent nearly 20 years lecturing in the area of criminology and the one division I would make between the literature on the subject has been that there are those who set out to understand the causes and nature of crime and imprisonment and there are those who want, in fact, effective techniques of control —"control-ology" if you like. I believe that we have to move beyond the notion of imagining that we have an enormously greater crime crisis than we have and of developing short term hysterical reactions based on fear, demanding even more stringent measures of control, towards a more patient understanding of the complexity of the causes of crime. I argue in favour of that.
In one of the early chapters the report came down in favour of factors that could be used to prevent the rate of crime. It spoke in favour of the restriction of penalties to keep people out of prison and to reduce the length of time in prison. It spoke about the reduction of the term of imprisonment. I think that running through this report too is this question of recidivism. Why do people keep coming back again and again and again to prison? The question that arises from the extreme right — and I hate using these terms but let us say from the people who are the harshest in their response to the crime wave — would be this: let us make it so unattractive for them in prison that they will never want to go back there again. They speak of colour television sets that they themselves have not. We all listen to this kind of stuff.
Let us be clear about what happens in prisonisation, or going to prison. First of all, there are three separate things happening. There is the psychological adjustment that is going on in the person who perceives that he is going to prison. I have to take the flow chart for example that is in the information appendix to this report. I think it is in Dr. Rottman's paper. You will see that those who go to prison are in fact, a very small proportion of those who ever commit offences. From the moment that they have been apprehended right to the moment they surrender their clothes and their items are listed, they are having an adjustment in themselves as to the kind of person they are. There is surely a change of identity going on. When they enter prison itself there is an atmosphere in which they can, for example, decide to be isolates or they can decide to mix with other prisoners who are parts of some kind of criminal sub-culture; or they may decide to try to make a fist of it by working out some way of managing the experience of prison itself. One way or another that process goes on. As well as that, their social links to society have now been disrupted. Skills which the rest of us take for granted in relation to education, work and human and other skills are now disrupted and shrunk, even in regard to relating to people of the opposite sex.
Then we come on to the other setting altogether, and that is when they come out of prison. These people have diminished skills and disrupted social relationships. They have equally the problem that society still has not made up its mind whether the slate is wiped clean because everybody has a record. Many particularly the juvenile offenders, go back into an environment of overcrowded housing, high rates of unemployment, extreme poverty and to other people, for example, who now have something to share, that is, experience of having been in prison. Therefore inter-generationally and intra-generationally, there is the exchange of the experience of prison. I found, as I read the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Penal System, a humane emphasis on this. I think that every little humane gesture that has been made so far, historically, has been supported in the report. It speaks correctly of the advantages of the juvenile liaison system. They warn about the excesses of "controlology", if you like, rather than understanding the nature of crime. They tell us in chapter 7 of the business of prison regimes and prison rules.
It is one thing to look at prison rules as they are on paper. It is another thing to look at them as they are experienced by people who are in prison. I recall evidence being given to the MacBride Commission, when I was a member of it, of rules being invented by those in charge of particular sections of a prison indicating that one prisoner, for example, could not hand a library book to another prisoner, or the way that the prisoner could get his hair done. There was a whole series of informal rules in prisons. I look forward to the day — and I place it on the record for about the fifth time in my ten years in both Houses — when we will be able to get into the Irish prisons to do the research that we were able to do when I was working in the United States where the prisons were far more open and where people could do some work on prisons, their background and conditions. In that respect the Whitaker report has broken ground and all of us working in the area of criminology must welcome it.
It think the report in relation to the general movement of the establishment of a separate board or institution to look after prisons is to be welcomed, even though I share the reservation of the Prisoners' Rights Organisation about the fact that the Department of Justice will still be left with control. This is less than the recommendation we made in the MacBride Commission. I am in favour of severing the connection with the Department of Justice, but I welcome the report as far as it has gone in relation to this question of setting up an independent board and an independent chief officer.
What the report says about women's prisons bears out what many of us have been saying. For example, in 1983 some 40 per cent of women offenders committed to custody under sentence were 21 years of age or less. This is stated on page 73 of the report. Some 80 per cent had been convicted of offences which did not involve personal violence. Apart from a very few people, there is no case for having women in prison in Ireland. There is no justification for it, historically or any other way.
In relation to the personal development of prisoners and on education, page 97 of the report warns against a certain tendency. I quote:
...Over the past two years educational provision has not kept pace with the greatly increased numbers entering prisons nor is it likely to do so unless there is a formal policy decision in this regard.
I would urge that more and more provision be made for the education of prisoners and for the kind of education which provides a range of choices suitable to prisoners' needs. Of course, the cynics, again commenting, said that the real reason for having less prisons and shorter time in prison was the quotation on page 147:
...for every 100 fewer new prisoners there will be a saving to public funds of:
Capital outlay — £12.7m
Annual cost — £3.8m
Therefore, they said it would be less expensive to have non-custodial measures.
May I conclude by saying this, because many Senators will want to speak and contribute to the debate on this motion. I would invite them to look in particular at the section on pages 248 and 249 which gives a description of the prison regime:
The daily routine in all the institutions is fairly standard. It is based on a time-table which allows for work or education activities in the mornings and afternoons and recreation in the evenings (outdoor during the summer). During winter one hour's outdoor recreation each day (weather permitting) must be given. The main features of the routine are the long lock-up time (about 16 hours and the short time available for work or education activities (about 4 hours). A typical time-table is:
8.00-8.15 a.m. morning call, unlock
8.30 a.m. Breakfast and lock-up
9.30 a.m. Unlock. Work/Education
12.30 p.m. Dinner and lock-up
2.15 p.m. Unlock. Work/Education
4.30 p.m. Tea and lock-up
5.15 p.m. Unlock and recreation
7.00 p.m. Supper
7.30-8.00 p.m. Lock-up
Do all those who feel that those of us who are in favour of reforming the prisons are simply soft or liberal hear the word "lock" so often in that quotation that I have read? The deprivation of freedom itself is a sufficient invasion into the life of an individual to ask the question: "what have we done in our society to make it so necessary that so many people have to suffer a regime like this?".
