I am pleased to have the opportunity of discussing issues relating to prisons and the Garda Síochána, and all that that implies, under the two Supplementary Estimates before us. This area of ministerial responsibility and governmental action or inaction is of fundamental importance. Indeed, on the degree of success which the Minister has, hinge the hopes we have for improving the stability of our society and the harmony thereof, because a system of justice is fundamental to achieving the kind of peace which is real peace based on a society which is at peace with itself. From the evidence to date it appears that we have a long way to go to achieve that.
An Estimate is obviously a great deal more than a fiscal statement. Perhaps it is time we began to think of an Estimate of proposed expenditure as a social statement. It implies some basic accepted philosophy of what one believes to be right and how one believes one should act. It is far more than a simple accountancy exercise and sometimes we are a little too ready to assume that that is all there is in it. I would have hoped, for example, that we might have in the Minister's remarks a little more of the reasons why this expenditure is as it is and whether or not the Minister expects it to be successful in terms of achieving the goals which I am sure he has set for himself and his Department. In other words, I thought he would have had a more fundamental approach to the expenditure than this accountancy exercise which occasionally occurs in these matters.
The question of the success of a prison system and of Garda Síochána involvement in the whole security operation is frightfully important. There is evidence to indicate that we are failing lamentably and I hope to be able to show the evidence of this. A previous Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clarke, said:
No activity of a people so exposes their humanity, their character, their capacity for charity in its most generous dimension, as the treatment they accord persons convicted of crime.
This reference is in a paper by Ramsey Clarke. I have no further reference for it but I can provide it to anyone who is interested. Allowing for a certain hyperbole in the statement it is a good summary of the degree of Christian commitment which a society such as ours would expect to have to people who are at least unfortunate and who could do with more attention than they have had heretofore.
Also in relation to expenditure such as thus we have to analyse what its purpose is, what goals it was designed to achieve. Would it be too much to ask that we could look forward to a society where crime rates would be diminishing, where there would be need for fewer security forces rather than more, where we could set our children the aspiration of living in a society which is free from the division, free from the mutual envy and the greed which is there at present and which would therefore be a more peaceful society?
I believe we can work in that direction. I am not saying it can be achieved overnight, but it is possible and it is our duty to work in that direction. That being the case, we should look at the elements of the present security structure to see to what extent it is successful. If we look objectively at the present system it can only be said to have failed. It has failed by any of the objective criteria which one would apply to it. It has failed for the regular inmates of those institutions, for the staff of those institutions and for the society in which those institutions stand. Again, the challenge in this respect is a major one and there are no easy or convenient answers to it.
I do not pretend to have a monopoly of wisdom here, but it is time we took stock of the present situation. If we have only been containing the situation, if prisons are at present in some way out of sight, and therefore out of mind, then we have something more to do than what has been done. Crime is not a mystery; at this stage it is quite a predictable phenomenon. I could predict quite positively there will be certain kinds of people—in some cases I could predict their very names—in prisons next year or in two or three years' time, because of the overwhelming evidence in relation to the social and cultural origins of crime. When such evidence is readily available to us it is perhaps regrettable that we do not apply ourselves more fundamentally to the origins and roots of the reasons for crime and work at that level as well. If we did that we would at least be investing in the hope that on a future occasion we would be able to look forward, not to increasing staff in institutions, not to encouraging the apparent growth industry of building new prisons which exist at the moment, but looking forward to the reverse. Surely that would be a healthy aim and a good objective for our society.
In order to do this meaningfully we must have some basic tenet or philosophy on what the prison system is supposed to do. For example, is it supposed to be essentially a weapon of retributive justice? Is it supposed to be a forum where people can be rehabilitated, where they can be socially-orientated individuals? I am not sure there is certainty about this. I have read extraordinary conflicting statements from gentlemen who should know better. If we consider what some of the people who have dealt with this issue have said we will see that they also were uncertain. However, there may have been some excuse for some of these statements, because they go back centuries to a time when we had not the benefit of a more modern approach to the problems. In a work entitled The Philosophy of Punishment, a collection of papers edited by H. B. Acton there are a number of papers dealing with this theme. For example, F. H. Bradley set himself against what he said was J.S. Mills' view that punishment is justifiable only as a means of benefiting the offender and protecting others. T.H. Greene discusses punishment by the State in the context of State action generally and says that “punishment is justifiable on account of the wrong-doer's violation of somebody else's rights”. He holds that this distinguishes punishment in principle from any sort of private vengeance or retaliation. Bernard Bosanquet deals differently with the matter. He contends that punishment in the context of State action in this regard is essentially the State's maintenance of rights by the use of force. He presents a view much like that of Green except that he is at pains to attack the idea that punishment is a sort of therapy. He is quite clear about what he wants; that is, that this is a means of punishing those who do wrong.
The impact of that approach on whether the people who have done wrong will eventually come to do right is not clearly expressed and is not his concern. It is the same with other writers. A man called Hastings Rashdall maintained that retributive justification of punishment was an unsatisfactory basis. He argued in the first place that if pains are to be matched with sin or moral guilt there must be some means of equating an amount of one with an amount of the other. However, he says this is quite impossible. According to him there is absolutely no commensurability between the two things. For him it is not adequate to say a man has done wrong and therefore the punishment shall fit the crime. It is deeper than that. A.C. Ewing develops a similar theme.
I am asking where we stand in relation to the question: what are prisons meant to achieve? I belive we have come to a stage in our civilisation where prison is no longer the mere incarceration of a man about whom we have come to admit failure, that the prison system must be so animated that it is a process whereby people are shown the error of their ways, are made to become members of society, to see that certain norms and values are right for that society and to accept them voluntarily. It is a big challenge and a major goal but I think it is what the Minister would wish prisons to be and what most civilised people would wish them to be. Unfortunately, that is far from the situation at present and the evidence is there to show that.
We have a duty to respond to that challenge. A man called Reinhold Niebuhr who speaks on matters like this said "The sad duty of the political system is to establish justice in a sinful world" He went on to say "There is no way to establish or maintain justice without law, that the laws are constantly changing to stabilise the social equilibrium of the forces and counter-forces of a dynamic society and that the law in its totality is an expression of the structure of government". The reference there is a book entitled Government as good as its people by a person called Jimmy Carter.
The point, therefore, is there must be a philosophical base for our approach to prisons. If we look at patterns of expenditure it is reasonable to say there has not been any fundamental review at any stage of whether prisons are successful, whether the ratio of expenditure should be changed to match our aspirations in this regard and whether there is any reconsideration of the degree of success we are having. I think that is a challenge and not so much the capacity of any Minister to manage to wheedle out of the Department of Finance the extra money to deal with staff or conditions. Those matters are important but they are symptoms of something much deeper. I believe that serious-minded politicians must apply themselves at that deeper level.
If we try to develop the theme of what is the function and purpose of prison and the purpose of justice in a society like ours, to quote Joseph Fletcher in a book entitled Situation Ethics, we will see that “We have been speaking of justice as a moral principle, not as something settled and static, transfixed in laws. The root jus means many things: law, both written and unwritten; rights; and standards or ideals but the basic distinction to be grasped is between moral justice and legal justice. The two, of course, are not antithetical, but it must be fully recognised that legal justice (law) always threatens to suffocate and cheat moral justice. Statutory laws, both civil and criminal, and the common law or custom, as in the Anglo-American tradition and most cultures, are in the situationist's view a necessary danger but not, note, necessarily evil”.
The question of the relationship between legal justice and moral justice comes in here. I would sum up what we need to aspire towards by saying that perhaps we need less law but more justice, because as long as we have laws that are static in relation to sections of the population, that are static in relation to their immutability with the passing years, there is an injustice. Presumably it is not possible to devise a system whereby law is such that is can reflect adequately the individual response it should have to an individual's circumstances, but certainly there is need for some regular review of legislation, and this of course would include the prison system. We need to have an inbuilt capacity to analyse regularly the degree of success we are achieving within the framework of the security system and we need a process which would allow the necessary evolution to take place so that we will be up-to-date rather than lagging years behind, introducing the appropriate response so late that it is outdated and newer demands have replaced the first demand.
I should like to quote the following words which sum up the view of one man in relation to prisons. He says:
.... prisons are monuments to a justice which is the antithesis of true justice. We proclaim our belief in one justice and practice its opposite under the same name. We enshrine in pomp and ceremonial a justice which is so deficient as to be the contradiction of the justice we are committed to by our faith. And that justice is a loving and saving one. Love cannot be enshrined in prison. For the essence of prison is rejection. And men come there because others have long before failed in their regard to practice the Christian law of love.
Those are not the words of some radical and tormented ex-prisoner. Those are the words of the Reverend John Byrne writing in Social Studies in June 1972. At that stage he was chaplain in Mountjoy Prison. I think his words are very fitting. They sum up the frustration of a Christian man with a system which seems to have lost its way. He mentioned the word “love” and he was right to do so. I hope it is not considered too gauche or naive to speak in those terms. If we are to achieve the kind of harmony and stability in our society which is fundamental we must do so on the basis of mutual respect which can grow into mutual love. The truth is that many of the inmates of our institutions would give a rather derisory laugh if the word “love” was described to them as being a phenomenon which society imparts in their direction.
If we really want to rehabilitate these men and women, if we really want to restore and heal our society in respect of the breach which their incarceration means, then we have got to speak about how we rebuild the norm of love in the system. To do that we should bear in mind that the only force that unites people, without mutilating or destroying them, is love. That principle, if applied not merely in this context but generally, could have great effect. We can only win these people who have broken the law, who have committed criminal acts, by winning their hearts. I know it is not easy to try to do this because I detect that our society today is ready for a hostile, anti reaction to such language and thinking. It is easy to respond much more harshly to people who are criminal. Sometimes it can be politically popular. Undoubtedly there would be a mass response in favour of such an approach, but I would reject it. I believe we must be far more level-headed, serious-minded and give far more leadership to people who would seek to have an emotive response to rising crime. That is not to say that one can accept lightly the growth in crime which is a particularly obnoxious phenomenon of the so-called civilised, developed western world. It is not a problem merely for this society. But the problem in our society is increasing in direct proportion to certain other social phenomena such as the growth in material affluence and the continual underlining of material welfare as being the primary goal, aspiration and norm of our society.
We must endeavour to see that the fundamental way of making progress here is by getting to the hearts and minds of these men and women, and that is a difficult job. But is it not a marvellous job, a marvellous challenge and vision to have, if that is the one we should have? And the success we could have will pay enormous dividends—even if we want to be mercenary about it—in terms of the saving later in relation to the costs which would otherwise accrue from generations of, we will call them, criminals spawning other generations of criminals. That is not the goal. The goal is a deeper one—to give to men and women the opportunity of being fulfilled, of becoming what they are entitled to become and what they can possibly become. That is where the satisfaction lies and where our job rests. Therefore, vengeance and retribution for its own sake, hatred or any passionate and emotive response to crime—no matter how objectionable the crime—does not have any place in a system of justice. It does not have any place in our thinking and, I am sure, in the Minister's. If we want to pin that principle to sound philosophy we can do it by quoting any number of people, whether we quote Christ who spoke simply about forgiving people seven times seventy or whether we want to quote any of the other more current philosophers. There are many good people—indeed people a lot better than I—who could be looked to for guidance in this respect. I believe very firmly that that is the approach, to get rid of these feelings which are too often uppermost, indeed uppermost in the minds—and I have heard it—even of people on the bench in some cases where I believe, mistakenly, the use of the words of "retribution", "punishment" or even "vindictiveness" for their own sake creep into what should be the enlightening and rehabilitating process justice is supposed to be.
Then we must ask ourselves what practical remedial steps does all of this entail. Obviously it is fine to have an ideal but we must distil it into some practical course of action, and there are such steps. We inherited a system form the past. Some of the trappings of that system are not easy to throw off or even to review objectively but I believe that we can show that change is needed. Therefore, we are talking here about a qualitative approach. I am somewhat disappointed sometimes when I hear various Ministers and spokesmen in various areas talking about progress being impossible or difficult because there is insufficient money. Obviously that is important and I am sure every Department could use more money. But what about the immediate job of asking how well utilised are the moneys that the Department have already? Is there something there for us to look at? I think there is. We could ask what we get in exchange for the present investment in the panoply of security forces, we will call it the security framework in general, embracing its various elements. If I might say so with respect, the Minister might very well take a fresh look at this to see if progress can be brought about here, progress which would not occasion enormous increases in expenditure. I hope to point to one or two of these in a moment which I hope will be of constructive help.
I think it is fair to say that the present system has failed us. It is arguable to what degree it has failed us, but it has failed us, because crime is rising in society. In my view there is no conviction in society that prisons are a way forward for rehabilitating criminals. Rightly or wrongly the prison system is seen as being a reflection of a class-based system of justice. That is really what I meant by the predictability of crime. We know, the Minister knows, anybody listening knows who is going to be in prison, give or take a street or two, give or take a generation or two, and it has always been that way. I do not think it need always be that way and I would hope that we could work to ensure that it would not be. For the criminal himself, for the inmates of these institutions themselves, it has failed.
Recidivism is a major problem. People are habitual; the majority of people in our institutions are habitual returnees, if I may coin a phrase, to the prisons. Therefore, it is not working. For the victim of crime, about whom very little is often thought, there is no degree of solace or comfort in the system. On the contrary, the victim of crime is usually fearsome of the return to society of the person who committed the crime when, if we were doing our job properly, he would not feel one way or the other about it but would assume that the person was now a changed man or woman, if that is not asking too much. In fact that is the extreme rarity but I am sure it does happen. Sometimes perhaps it happens through the goodwill of individual people in the system, and sometimes despite the system. But the facts are that, for the majority of the victims of crime—who are largely forgotten, about whom research is never done, that I am aware of, and who in many cases suffer enormously for the rest of their lives in a variety of respects whether it be enonomically, psychologically or indeed physically—the system has failed.
For whom has it succeeded? I do not know of any class for whom it has succeeded. Even the staff in those institutions are disgruntled and the Prison Officers Association time and again expressed their dissatisfaction about a variety of things. Sometimes that dissatisfaction is epitomised by requests for more money and other things but, basically, it is rooted in a frustration with their job, a frustration which sees the same men and women returning almost monthly. It must be very frustrating to be told that one's job is to return men whole to society and to hope that one can do the job but yet the same men return time and again. Sometimes that happens for reasons completely outside the capacity of the prison service to deal with. It is a major problem. The origins of crime and the capacity to heal crime have little to do with the prison. Those origins have to do with the environment, deprivation, bad housing and inadequate jobs and the hostility of the environment to the ex-prisoner.
I am aware that in some cases the immediate response of the ex-prisoner is almost to ask to be returned to the prison because he is at least assured of certain things in the institution. Until recently a man or woman when released was on his or her own with the exception of a tenuous link with welfare officers who are too few in number. The transition to the community is too dramatic and drastic and, of course, it does not work. People leave prison without money in their pocket or a job to go to. I am not pretending that the Minister can get jobs for everybody, but a gentler return to society would be helpful. Therefore, major and radical reforms are necessary. Some of them would not cost much money.
If one looks at the origins of crime and the reasons for it one will see that the predictability of it is rather tragic. In this connection I should like to refer to a number of surveys of ex-prisoners and young people. One can see in those surveys, in case it is necessary to convince anybody, that there is strong evidence of the socio-economic background of the men and women and a lack of education. A survey carried out by Rev. Brian Power and published in Social Studies in 1971 was based on a sample of people aged between 16 and 19. A question about literacy rates showed that 40 per cent of the sample were totally illiterate; 22 per cent had a low standard and 56 per cent of those from substandard areas were totally illiterate. The survey showed that 20 per cent of those questioned never worked; 8 per cent of them had steady jobs; 54 per cent had bad home relationships while 8 per cent had apparently good relationships; 40 per cent were in degrading need of money; 46 per cent needed money for enjoyment because they were on subsistence and 14 per cent had no marked dependence.
A depressing aspect of that survey was that in relation to what one might call the moral attitude of those surveyed 68 per cent considered that stealing was quite permissable if one did not get caught or if it was in a case of necessity, something which was open to a looseness of interpretation. With regard to the recidivism problem—this is depressing also—the survey found that 86 per cent of the people questioned had been previously institutionalised. A similar kind of picture emerged in a survey carried out in Ilfracombe. The obvious factors were extreme deprivation in relation to social, economic and educational environment.
In a survey of young people in the Sean McDermott Street-Summerhill area of my constituency carried out in May 1978 on boys between 12 and 16 years of age we found that the same type of statistics recur. If one was to tot up the summary one would find that the average number of criminal charges against some of those people was in the order of 27; they were regular offenders. The average one of those surveyed had been in court 52 times and the average conviction rate was six. The kind of criminal charges were averaging, per person, nine in relation to thefts from vehicles; eight in relation the thefts from shops, three in relation to thefts from houses and one in relation to assault of persons. One of the most significant figures that emerged from that survey was that the average number of childern in a family was eight. The same depressing and predictable statistics emerged when it came to employment of the mother or father. I do not believe there is anything new in that for the Minister, but those statistics serve to remind us that there is not any mystery about crime, it is as predictable as tomorrow's sunrise. That is what makes it so imperative that something should be done and makes us believe in the possibility of being able to do something about it. It is not as if it was all elusive or evasive.
I should like to pay credit to the work of the Prisoners Rights Organisation in undertaking a survey of 200 ex-prisoners. As they are not professionally trained social scientists we have to allow for a margin of error one way or another, but the general pattern of the survey is quite acceptable and bears out one's own research and the research of other professionals in the field. In the survey of the 200 ex-prisoners 60 per cent of the respondents were 20 years or over and under 30 years; 24 per cent were 30 years or over and under 40; 53 per cent resided within the inner city area and 27 per cent resided in working-class suburbs. In other words, 78 per cent of them resided in areas where, to put it as charitably as possible, social and other amenities were not as readily available as they are elsewhere.
In a small quadrant of inner city Dublin between 4,500 and 5,000 people live on one street, a figure which would make up a fair-sized town in rural Ireland. Yet, in spite of the fact that it is regularly the subject of odium in relation to the alleged law breaking capacity of some of its younger population, there are not in that street the most meagre facilities which any town would have a revolution about if they were deprived of them. I am referring to such facilities as cinemas, community centres, or shops. It is hard to imagine that in the complex there is not a shop or a Garda station. There is no crèche for mothers to put their children in.
We accept an incredible intensity of deprivation which would not be accepted anywhere else. Imagine building a town somewhere like Naas, and suggesting that we build wall-to-wall housing and nothing else. Not alone every politician and every planner, but every responsible person, would throw his hands up in horror and the scheme would be thrown out. What is not accepted in what we will call certain areas of society is, however, quite acceptable for people about whom our expectations are not very high. That is an important element. We must begin to renew our hope that crime is soluble—despite the mass of international evidence that it is on the increase—and must do something about it. The other way leads only to despair and pessimism and I do not choose to go that way.
In the survey of these 200 ex-prisoners 76 per cent did not go beyond primary school, and in relation to the quality of the primary schooling, about one-third of the respondents could not read or write on leaving school; 85 per cent of their fathers were unskilled labourers, casual workers, while 28 per cent of their mothers frequently worked, mostly at cleaning work. Of the respondents themselves, 65 per cent were seldom or never in work. It is extremely unfortunate that the State does not give the example which it exhorts on private and commercial companies. I recently heard of a young man who, after an altercation with some mates—a fist fight, involving no weapons—lost his job in the Army but, nevertheless, got a glowing reference testifying to his outstanding qualities as a soldier. This man had never been in any kind of trouble before, as the saying goes. Yet, Governments have the gall and the neck to ask others to do what they would not do.
I stress that there is no security implication here. When I asked the Minister for the Public Service last year in this House how many people employed in the entire public service might have had a record of being an inmate in one of these institutions, his answer was couched in such terms that my only interpretation was that there was not even one. In other words, there was no definite information and when I opined that there was none, it was not vehemently protested against. I am not blaming anybody, but asking how can we expect people to be rehabilitated, to be normal members of society, when we do not do something about jobs for them? Perhaps we could give some example here.
In relation to those ex-prisoners, 51 per cent were first convicted between the ages of 11 and 15 and years later, hardened ex-convicts, they are still committing crimes; 22 per cent were first convicted for offences against the person, while 46 per cent were convicted for offences against property, without violence; 55 per cent were sentenced to reformatories on their first conviction—that is now probably not much more than an historic footnote, thanks be to God—77 per cent were sentenced to imprisonment on their last court appearance; 41 per cent were currently involved in crime while 26 per cent said "No comment", 63 per cent of the respondents had served in juvenile institutions; 92 per cent had been to adult prisons.
To sum up, the majority of these ex-prisoners had been reared in the most deprived areas of inner Dublin, mostly in corporation dwellings. In effect, that was the first of a series of punitive measures that our society bestowed on a category or class of people, because they were not able to match with skills, expertise, or more probably, with monetary buying power, the standards of the slightly more fortunate people in our society.
I am not trying to lessen the importance or impact of crime, or the seriousness with which it must be taken. All I am asking for is a level-headed, forward-looking and somewhat idealistic view to be taken of the degree to which we can cope, not with the symptoms of this terrible social problem and malaise but with the roots of it, and perhaps we could look forward to the day when we could rid our society totally of crime. I also stress that I do not over-emphasise the role of the prisons or the Garda in this area. They are, unfortunately, dealing with the curative end of it, but the cure is not as good as it should be, even on its own terms.
The predictability of all of this has been borne out in many surveys. I do not intend to dwell on them, except to take one example from The Economic and Social Review, volume 7, No. 4, July 1976—an article headed “Towards the Identification of Educational Priority Areas in Dublin” by Agnes Breathnach. It is clear from that article that there are certain areas likely to be catchment areas for crime and other types of problem and they are relatively easily identifiable on a scientific basis. There are criteria which can be applied to an area which, if fulfilled in certain respects, indicate that that is a crisis area. We can, therefore, say “That is an area to which we must give a different type of attention”. We do not do that. I know it is not the responsibility of this Minister to get involved in the regional policy, in Irish terms, of his Government. But if the evidence is before us, if the likely potentiality of an area is clearly evident to us as being one from which crime will undoubtedly come with enormous weight, then our responsibility is all the greater and the opportunity all the more missed, if we do not take advantage of it. I would ask for a preventative approach to crime by tackling, trans-departmentally, all of the criteria which enhance the prospects of people becoming criminals. I am not suggesting that people are totally socially engineered. I am sure there are people who, by nature, genetic impulse, or chance, or original sin, may be more prone to crime than others. I know, and the Minister knows, that the overwhelming numbers of people involved in crime are not natural criminals; they are created criminals. They have been created by society and society must try to undo this wrong and, more importantly, to change the areas from which these people have come so that there will not be a continuation of a cycle of crime. This rise in crime is an enormous international challenge—a sociologist or a physical scientist would probably talk about a massive decline in confidence of democrative systems—but we are only putting our finger in the dyke. It is on the cards that we will not be able to contain this rise. Perhaps a new approach and a more fundamental view should be taken of our difficulties.
We see from the Garda Commissioner's report, for example, statistics which are awful in the literary sense of the word, which show the depth of the challenge to which we must rise. How do we cope with our prisoners? Do we meet with generally accepted standards throughout the world? Could prison conditions generally be said to accord with the sentiments put forward in the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and related recommendations of the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York, 1977 or the similar Resolution (73) 5 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners by the Council of Europe Committee of Minister both of which are similar documents? These documents refer in detail to standards which we would find acceptable and which we would probably say publicly are in operation in our institutions. It is clear that in many respects these minimum rules are not being applied in our institutions. The basic principle in Part I of these rules says:
There shall be no discrimination on grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
There is discrimination on the basis of social origin, property, birth or other status and the evidence is there for us to see. On the question of the distribution of prisoners the rules say:
Young prisoners shall be detained under conditions which protect them from harmful influences and which take account of the needs peculiar to their age.
People with any knowledge of this area know that the separation of the various categories, classes and ages of prisoners leaves a lot to be desired. The Minister from his recent announcement in relation to new institutions is trying to do something about this, but the fact is that today the minimum conditions laid down by the UN are not being accorded with in many of our institutions.
The sanitary installations shall be adequate to enable every prisoner to comply with the needs of nature when necessary.
Yet we have the spectacle of people having to use hygiene facilities which are unacceptable. The rules also say that collective punishment shall be prohibited. I am aware of cases where irregular conduct or breaches of rules has resulted in whole categories of prisoners being dealt with summarily and similarly. I know that in the management of a prison it is not always possible to be individually sensitive to every case, and I do not suggest that there is any malign or malevolent influence in operation. The necessary resources are not being injected into these institutions at present, thus many of these minimum standards are not being accorded with.
The limited success that the prison system has had is due largely to the work and the commitment of the prison officers. I am biased on this, perhaps, because my father was a prison officer for 32 years. Now and again I meet an ex-inmate of an institution who has a nice word to say about him. I am glad of that, as it would be unpleasant to come up with another reaction. The prison officers down the years were in most cases men of common sense and sound judgment. My only regret is that in some cases they had not the regular retraining, and in other cases they had not the resources and the investment by Governments which would allow them to do their jobs better. People like the Prison Officers' Association which only came together in recent years should get the ear of the Minister fairly regularly. I would also like if the Minister would ask his Department to at least respond to the letters of the Prisoners Rights Association. I understand that, whether by dictate or by accident, I am not sure, there is in operation a system whereby the correspondence of the Prisoners Rights Association is ignored. I am not aware that this group are involved in law breaking or are in some way under a cloud of suspicion. If they are, I can understand the Minister and the Department's attitude, but if not, the Department should at least acknowledge letters and respond to them with the standard of courtesy for which the Minister is well known.
There has been progress in recent years in the institutions and at the heart of this, where it is undoubtedly most needed is education. The Minister will agree that we have a long way to go before we get the right kind of educational framework in the institutions. Obviously there is a difficulty about utilising an educational system based on the presumption that people are free and able to respond in a cyclical way to terms of schools, teachers, conditions and so on, when the people we are talking about do not have much of a choice about whether they will knock off for the summer holidays or not. The Department of Justice in a letter dated 26 October 1976 to the Vocational Educational Commission of the City of Dublin said:
The policy document on the education of offenders in custody has now been completed and is with the Department of Education for their approval. I hope within the month to forward a copy to you and to arrange a meeting to discuss the policy. I am still awaiting sanction from the Department of Finance for transfer of money from the Department of Education Vote to the Department of Justice Vote so that this Department can reimburse directly all those educational authorities who provide a service to the Department.
The snail-like progress of educational reform in the institutions must be superceded by a much more hard headed approach. Education, properly structured with the right kind of course content and the right personnel, is at the heart of rehabilitating inmates of institutions, and no effort should be spared to try to speed up the measures presently in existence.
It is only fair to say that in the regime of the Minister's predecessor, Senator Cooney, significant improvements were initiated in the medical and educational training and welfare services provided for prisoners. The appointment of educational officers, the full scale library service made available to offenders in custody in Dublin, and the welfare service which has continued to expand, have all helped. The introduction in 1974 of a full-time induction and training course for new recruits to the prison service was also a good thing. All this showed that there is goodwill and the intent to do good. I would ask the Minister to take stronger steps and to accept that the public will not be hostile to enlightened reforms when they see them as being an investment in our future and not merely a response to a set of circumstances which are causing a nuisance to society by virtue of the crime impact on our community.
With regard to the library system which still leaves a little to be desired, it is only appropriate that one should pay tribute to Miss Maureen O'Byrne, Chief Librarian in the Dublin area, who is very concerned about this, and also to the Minister in that in the last week or so he has sanctioned the appointment of new personnel to deal with the library facilities in our institutions. That is a breakthrough also, and not before its time.
I will quote from a letter from a female ex-prisoner with regard to the library facilities in Mountjoy. She says:
Mountjoy female prison library facilities do not appear to have changed to any degree in the last ten years since I first was admitted as a prisoner. I will go further and say that nothing has changed in approximately 20 years if the condition of the books are anything to go by. The library is situated in the workroom, one glass case on either end. On one side of the room there is a glass case containing very old religious books with a sprinkling of history books. One day I actually succeeded in getting an officer to find a key to same. When we opened the door a musty odour hit us. I found most of the books decaying with damp, a considerable number of history books written in French, and I also noticed that almost all in this case bore Her Majesty's Prison Service stamp on the flyleaf. On the other side of the room is a double glass case of small dimensions and this contains mainly fictional romance novels, Denise Robbins, Barbara Cartland and so on. One shelf approximately 20 books devoted to art and crafts, needlework, cookery, knitting and soft toys. In view of the fact that none of the above-mentioned crafts are permitted for female prisoners to engage in even these are absolutely of no value. Being an avid reader, having also regard to the fact that the female prisoner has absolutely nothing else with which to pass the long hours of boredom, I systematically went through every book in the double glass case and found that with the exception of about 30 books I had read every one in 1975. Of the remaining 30 all were romantic fiction.
I know that improvements are coming about now to the library system. I have had a look at some of these libraries and they did leave a little bit to be desired. In view of the illiteracy of many of the inmates one can understand why there is a certain lethargy in regard to bringing about reform here. I trust that the new officer approved of by the Minister's Department, who presumably will be responsible for the liaison with the public library system in respect of how it is going to operate in the institution, will have every success. His appointment is a good step forward. If we can encourage interest among prisoners in self-education and self-teaching and in ability to lift themselves out of the rut into which some of them have fallen, this will be a step in the right direction.
There have been improvements in other directions. For example, I have heard criticisms about the diet in the institutions. I make no bones about the fact that I would be very happy to exist on the prison diet, and I wish now and again that I had the same time or leisure to enjoy my meals as prisoners have. There is no question but that the improvements brought about in the prison diet over the years are very good. The regret is that the same standards are not maintained when the inmates leave. If the same implicit standards were enjoyed by people in their environment outside the prison, not only in dieting matters but in others also, perhaps there would not be enough people in the institutions. The diet sheet is extremely satisfactory. Visiting committees pay attention to that as also do the medical officer and others, and I am not aware that diet is any longer a cause of concern. I understand that it is nutritious and varied. That is an area where there has been progress.
There are more fundamental issues about the prison system which we could look at. One that troubles me somewhat which I would ask the Minister to consider seriously is the following: if the concept of a prison is to try to rehabilitate offenders, if the idea is to be able to restore to the community the inmate who has fallen by the wayside, it is going to be very difficult to do this if the institutions are, in effect, closed-off units or islands cut off from effective communication with the society of which they are or should be an integral part. There is a risk here in that if you open the doors or go in for more open prisons, undoubtedly you will have people abusing that system, but I am not talking about that. I am asking the Minister to consider a new structure of management for prisons which would have a board of directors, appointed by him, of people interested in the concept of justice and drawn from presumably all walks of life with the commitment and the time to devote to it, to whom would be answerable a chief executive officer, that job presently being exercised by the governor. If the role of governor as we now see it were to be replaced by a more open system which would have people answerable to the Minister who were members of the community appointed by him and to whom the CEO exgovernor would be answerable in respect of how the policy of the Minister's Department would be carried out, a lot of the suspicion and concern, some of it unnecessary, some of it not warranted, would diminish.
It is unnecessary and disturbing that the primary characteristic of our institutions is their closed, cut-off, insular nature, carried in some cases to obsessive and paranoid extremes. I have had complaints repeatedly of difficulties of communication and of eliciting from the Department the most rudimentary information about conditions and about inmates. This does the Minister and the Department with the fine body of people involved there a gross disservice. It is probably no more than what might be called a kind of administrative paralysis, and if the Minister had a chance to look at it he would agree that some of its more obnoxious aspects are unnecessary. I will give one example of what I mean. The Minister will be aware that there was a difficulty in St. Patrick's in October 1978. One of the mothers speaks as follows about her son who was in St. Patrick's at the time, and I quote from her letter:
At the end of October I was listening to the radio one day and heard that there had been a riot in St. Patrick's. I went up at 11.00 a.m. that morning when visiting started and asked to see my son. The prison officer at the main door refused me a visit and refused to give me any information about Joe. I contacted my son's solicitor as I was worried that he might be hurt. I visited the prison that afternoon and was refused a visit. A large number of other parents arrived and were also refused. The officer said that they were contacting the Department of Justice to see whether they should be let in. I and other waited until nearly 6.00 p.m. and we were then told that there would be no visits until further notice and that the parents would be contacted by post. A few days later I got a brief letter to say that he had been transferred to Mountjoy. I went straight up to the Joy and the prison officer in charge of visit told me that all his visits and privileges were suspended for a month. A priest came to my home after two weeks to say that I could visit my son again.
There is the torment of a mother expressed fairly clearly. The letter from the Department on the following day was a pre-printed form saying that the son had been transferred to another prison. We could do better than that. I am not suggesting that in the aftermath of a riot, where presumably tough, hardened criminals were involved and where physical injury was done to officers and perhaps to prisoners, we should have a welcoming party of visitors. I am suggesting that it is not unreasonable that in 1979 a mother who wants to enquire about her son should not have to wait two weeks, in anxiety presumably, to get the most meagre details about his welfare. Is it not possible that somebody could give an answer, if not that day then the next morning, about the physical conditions and the welfare of an inmate to a person such as a mother? After all, the mother has done no wrong as far as we know; she has not been convicted of any wrong anyway. The response that I have talked about is unnecessarily harsh and punitive and is not a symptom of the compassion and caring system which I believe is essential and that I would like to see.
Surely there is not an official in the Department of Justice who in his heart of hearts would not prefer to see a better system than that in the prisons. If that is the case all we need is the will to make it happen, and perhaps the Minister could do that. There are ways and means of doing this. It may mean more staff. I believe it is unnecessarily harsh that a person who wants to make a basic inquiry about a son or daughter in an insitution has to be deprived of that information for weeks. That is one side of the story, and there may be another side to it, but that is the kind of attitude which one gets directed too often at the Department of Justice. It is a disservice to the people in that Department. The closed nature of prisons should be looked at again. The paradox of people being made ready for return to an open society in an institution so closed off as to be virtually an island obviously leads to a breakdown.
With regard to the reasons for crime and the growth of crime there is evidence to show that we could be doing a little more about this. I would like to quote a letter from a young man, one of a family of 14, who has been in trouble almost since he was able to walk, who has said:
When I was seven I was sent to Clonmel school by Justice Kennedy. I was in it for nine years. The brothers and priests were very nice to me on my first day. A few months went by and things began to get rough. At that time I had a habit of wetting my bed. Myself and a few of the lads were told that if we wet the bed we would be put into girls' dresses. It happened that myself, my brother and a few of the lads wet the bed and were put into dresses and told to go to school in them. We had no choice or else we would get slapped with a leather strap. This kept going on for a while and we would not stop wetting the bed so they started putting us to bed at six o'clock in the evening as well as being slapped. We got no pocket money at the end of the week. That was the junior group. I got a bit older and was put into another group which was called Group B. This was worse. If you wet the bed you were given a thousand lines for every day you wet the bed. If you ran away from the school and got caught you would then be brought to a small room and you would get kicked all over the room. After that you would get your head shaved and made kneel in the middle of the yard. I got older and I was put into Group C, that is the senior group. It was not too bad but I got a job on the farm. There was a fellow there called .... who used to be in the school but now was outside. He was head man on the farm. May I say he was one big .... When you were down on the spud field picking spuds and missed the spuds he would come right behind you with a stick and bash you with it. I left when I was 18. I got no job from them, no money at all so I got into trouble and was put into jail four times. I think in future anyone that leaves school should be fixed up in a job or something. That is all I have to say.
That is a garbled cry from the heart from somebody who, through no fault of his own, had to suffer in this institution and was not given much chance to make good. If he makes good it reflects great credit on him and on those who seek to help him. That is probably now only a historical anecdote, although it is not that long ago. That letter was written this year and that young man if not in his late teens is only in his early twenties. We are not talking about the last century. Is that the kind of society the wild geese fled for? I do not believe it is.
I have been reading during the week tributes in the papers to the memory of Pádraig Pearse, much of them filled with wise sayings. If there could be some practical action in relation to matters like this perhaps the public might listen a lot more to the words being said.
Some of the major rights of prisoners need to be looked at. I know that the balance of management and control of an institution is a very difficult one. I have a lot of sympathy with the people who have to run those institutions. They are working in an environment that is very unsympathetic and receive very little award. They are dealing all the day with difficult people, and the job of prison governor and prison staff is very difficult. I do not wish to add to their difficulties.
Do we often take short cuts in relation to some of the rights which the inmates of those institutions have? We do not think very clearly in relation to some of those rights, in relation to the degree to which constitutional rights are suspended when somebody is convicted and there is a long legal discussion at home and abroad about that aspect of it. To what extent does a prisoner retain constitutional rights? To what extent could those rights be pursued through the legal process? There are many examples of conflicting evidence in relation to that. I would like to see the Minister taking up that issue in a fundamental review of the system.
The rights and remedies open to prisoners in pursuance of a stated charter or rights or at least the rights of human beings enshrined in our Constitution leave something to be desired. There have been some very conflicting comments by a number of judges and eminent legal people in relation to the possibility of pursuing those rights. The question of probation and bail also seems too arbitrarily interpreted. There seems to be an unevenness of interpretation which seems to give way to the belief that there is a lack of certainty on the part of the Government with regard to how those rights should be enshrined and how they should be circumscribed.
The question of legal advice and the ability of an inmate to be represented at an internal hearing are important matters, and deal with the rights of prisoners. We could learn a good lot from the American and Swedish approach to those problems. I do not pretend that Sweden has the answer to all problems, but it is folly if we do not make the best use of the expertise gained in other systems. The American system of justice, which is more advanced in some respects than ours, may have pointers for us in this regard.
When talking about the rights of prisoners I am reminded of one particular one, the electoral right. I understand that a prisoner has the constitutional and the legal right to vote and the only reason it does not happen is because the facility for such voting has never been bothered with. I have not heard that there is any great demand for voting rights for inmates, but they either have or have not a right to vote. As far as I am aware it is not said anywhere that they have not a right to vote. If they have a right to vote they are entitled to vote and facilities should be made available. This could possibly be done by a postal vote.
The same can also be applied to mental health and the degree to which people can be incarcerated on the basis of allegations against their mental wellbeing. The monitoring process, which could allow people to get the second or third vital opinion which might save them from a life of incarceration in an institution in which they are labelled insane, is very unsatisfactory. We all know of cases that have a ring of questions about them as to the reasons for some of these people being in certain institutions. There have been some very disturbing stories, not necessarily about prisons but about some mental homes. The same kind of thinking applies. Therefore, there is need for more clarity in these areas. There is need for the clear writing down of human rights for these people, and human rights must not vary in importance. They must be the same for a law abiding member of society as they are for someone whom we might refer to loosely as being a member of the criminal classes. Each category in our society is entitled to know exactly where it stands. Should those people be kept in ignorance of these rights, whether by accident or design, they are being deprived of those very rights. It would be a good day's work to have some review in that area.
It is time, too, that we considered the question of how to make these institutions useful. Very often people who have been the victims of crime have a grievance in that there would seem to be little thought given to them, but we have an opportunity here for the Minister and the Government to say that from now on the situation will not be all one way, that we will turn our places of detention into productive units. I see nothing unacceptable in the commitment to turning places of penal servitude into what might be regarded as commercial enterprises. It is the opposite of all we hold to be important in the area of the rehabilitation of people to lock them up for many hours because every hour during which they are locked up represents a further admission of our failure to deal with them. There is much work that could be tackled by the inmates of these institutions and I would not be faint-hearted about committing the resources of these institutions to such work on the basis that the people concerned are detained because they have taken from society. Consequently, we would be giving them an opportunity of making good that debt.
The kind of work that might be undertaken is a subject that could be developed at some length. I shall not go into detail on that now because it is an area that needs a fair deal of attention. However, it is no longer good enough that we would hold to the concept of people being incarcerated in an institution and let out on a leash, as it were, for recreation. Instead, we should concentrate on using the services of these people in areas of agricultural, social or commercial need. Any such system would have to be operated on a voluntary basis and with incentive and reward. In this way we would be allowing people to rediscover the value of productive work. We would be shortening their days in these institutions and helping them to regain the dignity and self-respect that is fundamental to rehabilitation. In addition it would be their way of saying to society "we were wrong in what we did and this is one way in which we are trying to make good." Unfortunately, we are far from such a situation now and some of the sounds I have heard from trade unions in this regard have been very lacklustre.
I am aware of the work done by people on a voluntary basis, by members of visiting committees and indeed by prison staff, in endeavouring to find work for inmates or ex-inmates. In order for any such scheme to be successful the support of the trade unions would be necessary, but at least some of those bodies have been lacking in enthusiasm in this regard. Perhaps this is understandable should there be competition for a job. However, the political responsibility for this aspect of rehabilitation rests with the politicians while the moral responsibility for the wellbeing of our society rests with each one of us, regardless of which category we are in. We need to have a committed role on the part of the trade unions if the Department are to be successful in the area of rehabilitation. Therefore, there would not be anything wrong with the idea of a commitment to a work programme.
While the conditions in these institutions are improving all the time, there is still much to be desired. In this regard I would refer the House to a letter I received from a Mr. Gerald Masterson, a former prison officer who resigned in 1978 after eight years' service. In a lengthy letter he referred to some practices that are being continued but to which he would object. He says, for instance, that the pot-carrying practice whereby prisoners empty their chamber pots morning, afternoon and evening is unhygienic and could be ruled out by inhabiting only every other cell in these places and fitting the empty cells with toilets and wash basins. I know what the response to that will be, but the point is valid. Another point made in this letter, and which is not foreign to my own way of thinking, is that the woodyards be phased out or at least curtailed and retained only for those prisoners who break the prison rules of discipline. Mr. Masterson refers, too, to the question of offences and punishment within an institution. As an ex-member of a visiting committee I am aware that these committees, like the governor, have certain powers to punish in respect of the infringement of rules and regulations. Might it not be possible to introduce also a system of credits and rewards for people who do good and who go beyond the mere call of duty, because it seems to me that if we are willing to punish for what is wrong we should be willing also to reward for what is right.
In a document published in 1973 by a group who call themselves the Prison Study Group and entitled An Examination of the Irish Penal System there are references by way of a summary of their main observations to a variety of areas in the prisons which need attention. However, it is only fair to say that there have been changes in many of these areas since then. They make the point about the closed system of administration and say that there is confusion regarding the role of prisons and that the idea of rehabilitation is accepted now by those responsible for running the prisons. They say, though, that Irish prisons do not rehabilitate and are punitive, that a period of 15 hours daily alone in a cell cannot be regarded as anything but punitive. This group say also that, while prison officers are anxious to play a rehabilitative role, according to the regulations their only duty is to keep the prisoner in safe custody. They observe that two out of every three prisoners in Irish prisons are recidivists, that one out of three prisoners has been in prison on at least five occasions and that the vast majority of prisoners serve short sentences. As an example of this they say that in 1970, 82 prisoners served terms of less than six months. The figure the group give for prison expenses would no longer be relevant but even then it was very high. They criticise prison work by saying that it is menial and would not assist a prisoner's chances of employment on release. It is only fair to say again that there have been improvements in that regard. There are new workshops and equipment there now which were not there when this report was compiled but these facilities are small proportionately in terms of the prison population. The group refer also to our prison system being based on a process of degrading the inmates. While I would not subscribe to that view, I think I know what is intended. In effect what they are saying is that a system which regiments people, which locks them up for long periods each day and which fills all the gaps in the timetable, with the exception of a small period of recreation which is closely guarded, tends to dehumanise.
Our penal system is at least 150 years old and during that time there has not been any substantial change in prison regulations or in prison architecture. Our system is still governed by the Official Secrets Act. While on this side of the House the Minister said he was concerned about some of these issues and he seemed determined to demonstrate that on his part there was a commitment to reform, we shall not go into chapter and verse on that except to say that some of what could reasonably be expected on the basis of what we said at that time still remains to be fulfilled. The Minister obviously has plans and perhaps he might tell us more about them at some other stage. A lot more could be done than has been done so far.
The question of the possibility of the introduction of some sort of independent appeal and tribunals procedure should be considered apart from the visiting committees. I have my own reservations about the degree to which the visiting committees are enabled to work. For periods of the year they are not in office. Reports have gone into the Minister's Department from these visiting committees asking for reforms, some of them of a very small nature, for example leaving a visiting committee in existence until a new one is about to be appointed. I would ask the Minister to refresh his mind and the mind of his Department on some of the sensible proposals from these decent men and women who have given voluntarily of their time to do a fairly complex job and who usually end up being nobody's friend in the end.
An organisation calling itself Pax Christi has made some interesting comments on the prison system and time does not allow us to go into them in great detail. It refers to some of the needs which are not being met adequately and they include in that the kind of respect for the prisoner as an individual which is a prerequisite for creating the kind of climate which is essential to him, proper counselling to help the prisoner to see that it is his responsibility to effect change within the law.
The Minister is now about to create some new institutions. I would ask him to stand back from that, to consider the possibility of introducing what I would call a hierarchy of these institutions with varying responses to different types of crime. He should consider the open prison system which is there at present, small home-type residential units for people, varying levels rather than the idea of the big barracks-type prison being created in central points which is an outdated concept. This is one thing that would allow some development and I stress that I am not advocating opening the gates of the institutions tomorrow or anything like that. I would ask the Minister to have somebody in his Department investigate the use of drugs, not by the inmates, but by the staff in these institutions. We hear rumours about over-prescription for inmates which, accidentally or otherwise, help to have inmates relatively subdued and relatively peaceful.
I would like to see the prison system being used much more flexibly for many other types of crime than at present and not merely for categories of society who have to spend months or years there. There is no reason why people who are caught in certain types of crime which at present are considered to be relatively minor should not meet with the threat of imprisonment for a night or for a weekend if the Minister in his wisdom decided to do this. Prison is not merely for deprived classes of society who act in contravention of the norms of society. I would ask the Minister to look again at the Darra O Briain Report and its recommendations and to accept them and to implement them. I would ask him also to ensure that illtreatment and accusation of illtreatment cannot arise by opening the system in the way I have outlined, by ensuring proper appeals tribunals in the system and so on. That is very important. I know the vast majority in the Garda Síochána and in the prison service would abhor any such carry on and therefore the Minister is pushing an open door.
I will conclude by saying that the introduction of a code of police ethics based on the Declaration of the Hague might be useful and helpful to him. There are other reforms which, if I had time, I would refer to and there are other aspects of this whole issue which are very important. Finally, the Garda Síochána aspect of this will be dealt with by my colleagues. I would ask the Minister to consider finally a small poem by an inmate which I think is a fitting footnote to our discussion. This was written by a prisoner serving a life sentence. He says:
I'd love to walk a country road,
in the silence of the night,
with the rain falling
and the birds calling
I'd love to see that sight
I often lay on my bed at night
and look out at the stars,
and all that comes to my mind
are the cold prison bars
If I could only do the things
I should have done before
I'd ask for nothing else in life
I'd be at heavens door
The things I took for granted
are the things that really mattered
its only now I realise
my hopes have all been shattered
Perhaps we could unshatter some of those hopes.
