Judge says new drugs court scheme must get resources

The Government's new drugs court scheme will have to be backed up with increased resources for probation services and prisoner rehabilitation if it is to be effective, a High Court judge has said.

Speaking at an Irish Penal Reform Trust conference on women's prisons, which took place at the weekend in Trinity College Dublin, Mrs Justice McGuinness said it was "excellent" to see the new court system being set up on a pilot basis.

However "the essential pressure which must be kept up is for sufficient back-up resources to be provided to the court".

Mrs Justice McGuinness said the courts were presently served by a probation service of high quality but one that was "so overworked that if one asks for a probation report at a sentencing hearing, the report cannot be provided for a period of between two and three months because there aren't sufficient probation officers available to do them".

The criminal justice system had "struggled for years" with "Victorian buildings which were totally inadequate for their purpose" and a Victorian penal regime and philosophy which compassionate prison governors and staff had attempted to mitigate.

Existing detoxification programmes and training courses in prison had been compromised by the fact that prisoners did not serve anything like their full sentence because of overcrowding in prisons, she said.

"I'm sure that I'm far from being the only judge who has wondered from time to time what exactly is being achieved for the victim, the offender, or indeed society in general by sending this particular person to prison and knowing in the case of minor drug offences that it is not necessarily going to make them better and may indeed make them worse. "

"While a few women are imprisoned for violent offences, the vast majority are in prison because they have become involved in drug taking or in stealing to feed a habit, or perhaps in prostitution . . . Many of these women are very vulnerable and almost all of them are poor.

"Can we really claim that these women by and large emerged from prison after their sentence any less likely to return to their former lifestyle?" she asked. She acknowledged the existence of situations where imprisonment protects the public "from a very real danger. But in very many cases, particularly in lesser offences, what is needed is a well-rounded, viable and positive alternative form of sentence".

Mr Brendan O'Friel, a former chairman of the Prison Governers Association of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a former governor of Strangeways Prison, said women were "a neglected minority among prisoners", who "suffer especially from being taken away from their families".

He said the number of women prisoners in England and Wales had doubled in six years and he was worried about the privatisation of prisons and the "growing commercial interest in a high prison population".

"I hope to God you're able to hold the line in Ireland against this inappropriate use of prison accommodation", he said.