PEOPLE are right to be shocked and angered when a person who receives a lengthy prison sentence for a serious crime commits further serious crime while on temporary or early release.

The universal experience of imprisonment is that it rarely succeeds at the task of reformation and rehabilitation, but often serves only to nurture a criminal career. But the one job a prison can be expected to do well is to incapacitate the criminal and prevent him from further crime for the period of the sentence. It is a major part of the current crisis in criminal justice that the Irish prison system is now more and more frequently failing at this simple task.

The system of early release due to prison overcrowding has been termed the revolving door syndrome. At any one time as many as 500 offenders can actually be serving their sentence of imprisonment while at unsupervised liberty, under the full temporary release system. Many offenders with sentences of three months spend only a few days in prison and a great many offenders with longer sentences serve far less than half of their sentence. Without doubt a great many of these quasi prisoners are involved in crime, some of it serious.

Apart from the issue of crime committed on temporary release, the practice of early release on this scale undoubtedly erodes the meaningfulness of imprisonment for everyone involved. Most obviously, the deterrent effect of imprisonment is almost totally abolished for the many who are set free after serving only a small fraction of their sentences.

Police, prosecutors, judiciary, and prison officers are likely to be disheartened and demoralised by the system. Oscar Wilde once remarked that If England treats her criminals as she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any." Many present day Irish prisoners are in the happy position to say If Ireland treats all her prisoners as she has treated me, then she won't have any."

THE Minister for Justice, Ms Nora Owen, and her Department are acutely aware of the problem. The Management of Offenders, the Department's 1994 five year plan, pointing to the number of prisoners on unsupervised early release and the wide spread doubling up of prisoners in single cells, makes an irrefutable case that the system, as it is currently run, needs around 3,000 prison cells. This is the minimum requirement in order simply to hold all remanded and convicted prisoners, one to a cell, for the proper, designated periods of time.

This represents an immediate demand for over 1,000 new prison places at a cost upwards of £120 million, leading to further massive annual operating costs. It takes no account of the possibility of future growth in the prison population, or of current proposals to introduce preventative detention for as many as 800 suspects, or of the need for a prison system to have some surplus accommodation at its disposal. In this context the revival of the Castlerea Prison plan with its 120 new prison places represents a mere drop in the ocean, with little potential to alleviate the present accommodation crisis.

This appears to be a disastrous situation which seems to point inexorably to the need for more and more prison places. However as the Taoiseach, John Bruton, made clear in a thoughtful and enlightened interview to RTE at the time of the deferral of Castlerea Prison, there is an urgent need to look behind the expansionist agenda and to question the actual use Irish society makes of imprisonment, its severest available sanction.

Apart from the inordinate cost and general ineffectiveness of the prison remedy, there are strong arguments in favour of far greater use of non custodial approaches.

IN fact, there is compelling evidence that the courts in Ireland still resort to imprisonment far too readily in the case of categories of offenders whom other European countries would be reluctant to imprison. We have a similar rate of imprisonment to countries with two or three times more crime.

We have by far the highest proportion of imprisoned people aged under 21. In 1991, 75 per cent of all convicted committals to prison were for non violent offences, even by the Department of Justice's own very broad definition of violence, which includes trivial assaults and violence against property.

Astoundingly, almost 22 per cent of committals in 1991 were for failure to pay debt or fines and there was also a considerable number for motoring offences. Moreover, only 25 per cent of offenders in prison at any one time in 1991 were convicted for offences of violence against the person.

The available evidence we have indicates that the rapidly increasing prison population of the last two decades arises more from the increase in longer sentences than from the increase in committals as such. Committals have increased but not in proportion to the growth in crime and it is the longer sentences which seem to account for much of the increase in the demand for prison places. One sign of this is the recent accumulation in the system of sex offenders with very long sentences.

However, the total number of committals to prison under sentence actually went down between 1988 and 1991, generally by almost 6 per cent, but, surprisingly, for offences of violence against the person, by a substantial 19 per cent. This, then, is a highly complex, bewildering picture, signalling an urgent need for research and innovative thinking.

However, basic information on sentencing and the use and effects of imprisonment is almost entirely lacking. The judiciary, in particular, is not provided with any kind of useful feedback on its sentencing practice and its effects.

While the administrative focus is, understandably, always on an overcrowded prison system under constant pressure, the true crisis is that there is almost total ignorance about the broader context of whom we send to prison, why and to what effect.

In the absence of the relevant data and analysis, it is impossible to provide a definitive answer to the vital questions about whether imprisonment, as the sanction of last resort, is or is not used prudently in Ireland or about whether sentence lengths are generally appropriate, that is before they are foreshortened at the discretion of civil servants.

Research into these questions is an urgent much needed first step towards understanding and then, as far as possible, getting to practical grips with the situation.