John Deasy
Ceist:177 Mr. Deasy asked the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the number of prisoners serving a sentence for public order offences; and the number of those who have committed a previous similar offence. [26031/03]
Written Answers. - Prison Committals.
There are 417 prisoners serving sentences for the crimes listed in the following table which are readily identifiable as public order type offences. The number of persons serving a sentence for each offence is also included in the table. A significant number of the prisoners included in this table are also serving sentences for other non-public order offences. Similarly, a considerable number are serving sentences for more than one of the offences listed below. For this reason the total number in the right column of the table substantially exceeds the figure of 417 referred to above.
|
Offence |
Number servingsentence |
|
Affray |
1 |
|
Begging |
5 |
|
Breach of the peace |
11 |
|
Conduct calculated to provoke a breach of the peace |
44 |
|
Disorderly conduct |
3 |
|
Drunk and a danger to traffic |
25 |
|
Drunk and disorderly |
13 |
|
Failure to comply with Garda |
51 |
|
Indecency vagrancy act |
1 |
|
Intoxication in a public place |
101 |
|
Language calculated to lead to a breach of the peace |
23 |
|
Malicious damage |
6 |
|
Obstruction of peace officer-Garda |
68 |
|
Profane and obscene |
1 |
|
Public mischief |
3 |
|
Riot |
1 |
|
Simple drunkenness |
10 |
|
Threatening and abusive behaviour in a public place |
318 |
|
Threats of violence |
2 |
|
Urinating in public |
2 |
|
Violent disorder |
35 |
|
Wilful obstruction |
1 |
For other offences, for example assault, it is impossible to ascertain whether there is a public order dimension to a case without examining each instance individually. Such an exercise would be a time consuming and expensive operation and I could not allocate valuable resources to such work at this time.
As regards previous convictions, a comprehensive information technology system, PRIS, contains detailed prisoner information and it commenced in each prison institution in 2001. It will improve over time as more data is entered into this system. It is anticipated that more detailed statistics will be available in the coming years. At present the Irish Prison Service can only provide information on offenders committed on sentence since the installation of PRIS. Consequently, any figures provided would be incomplete and therefore somewhat misleading.