THE NUMBER of people being referred by the courts to the Probation Service as an alternative to prison fell last year, despite jails being so full that one in six inmates has been freed early for lack of cell space.
The decline in referrals comes as new research from the Probation Service reveals that the cost of imposing a community service order is at least 66 per cent cheaper than imprisonment.
In some cases the saving is as high as 89 per cent, according to the research outlined in the Probation Service 2010 annual report.
Probation Service director Michael Donnellan said not only were community service orders cheaper than imprisonment, they were also an effective way of tackling crime and their great use was supported by most stakeholders in the criminal justice sphere.
“Initial indications from the White Paper on crime consultations support the principle of penal moderation, greater use of non-custodial sanctions, early intervention and prevention methods,” he said.
Stakeholders who had made submissions to the White Paper process also believed that rehabilitation should be the main purpose of criminal sanctions.
“They also supported the greater use of community service orders, orders that should be served in offenders’ own communities with resulting benefits made known to the public.”
The Probation Service delivers a range of supervision options for offenders, both as an alternative to prison and as a post-release element to an imprisonment-based sanction imposed by a court.
The two most commonly used mechanisms as an alternative to imprisonment are probation orders and community service orders.
A probation order involves an offender being placed for a defined period under the supervision of a probation officer, whose directions the offender must follow. The offender also enters into an agreement with the court to avoid reoffending.
A community service order enables a judge to sentence an offender to periods of between 40 and 240 hours of community service.
This involves working in a community under the supervision of a probation officer.
The number of referrals by the courts last year to the Probation Service declined by 8 per cent; from 9,675 in 2009 to 8,934 last year.
This decline occurred during a period of continued exponential growth in the prison population.
This has resulted in worsening chronic overcrowding, precipitating new legislation requiring a judge to consider imposing a community service order if considering a jail term of 12 months or less.
That measure is contained in the Criminal Justice Community Service Amendment Bill passed by the Oireachtas last month. It is aimed at encouraging a sentencing policy away from imprisonment towards non-custodial sanctions in a bid to ease prison overcrowding.
In 2000, the average prison population on any one day was 2,919. On June 22nd last, there were 4,433 people in prison.
Almost 750 mostly short-sentence inmates are already afforded early release because there is no room for them in overcrowded jails. This represents 17 per cent of the prison population, with an even worse situation in some prisons.
Early releases from Cork Prison have reached 35 per cent because of a lack of space and 21 per cent of the population of Mountjoy is on release because there is no space.
A Government-appointed expert group last month warned that 30 per cent of the 4,500 prison population will be on early release by 2016 if nothing is done to solve overcrowding.