THIRTY ONE of the 359 prisoners granted temporary release for Christmas have not returned to custody, the Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, has confirmed.
In a written reply to the Progressive Democrats justice spokeswoman, Ms Liz O Donnell, yesterday, she said the prisoners had failed to return to eight institutions.
Eighteen of those now "unlawfully at large" had been male prisoners in Mountjoy; five had been in St Patrick's Institution; another had been a woman prisoner in Mountjoy; three had been in Wheatfield; and the remainder had been held in the Mountjoy Training Unit, Shelton Abbey, Shanganagh Castle or Portlaoise.
Admitting that the 31 prisoners had not returned to jail by January 24th, the Minister said that, if found, they could be arrested without further warrant and immediately returned to custody.
However, Ms O'Donnell said the Minister had been unable to answer her question about the proportion of sentence served by each prisoner granted temporary release; the Department does not collect this data and operated the temporary release scheme in a very ad hoc fashion, she added.
Every year convicted offenders who had been sentenced to serve a prison term were subsequently released into the community for Christmas and every year a substantial number failed to return.
"By and large, the Justice Department uses temporary release to offset the huge problems presented by the chronic shortage of spaces in Irish prisons. Last year, 4,500 temporary release orders were granted, affording short periods of release from prison," Ms O'Donnell added.
A further 4,000 were released on "full temporary release" which is, in effect, "goodbye, full, unconditional and unsupervised release", she said.
There was no consultation with relatives or victims of prisoners and neither was there any record of how many of such persons reoffended while on temporary release. This highlight "the appalling vista of a liability on the State posed by civil actions taken, by persons injured by those on temporary release".