The furore over the release of rapist Larry Murphy has drawn attention to treatment, in and out of prison, for sex offenders, writes CONOR LALLY, Crime Correspondent
IT TOOK Larry Murphy less than 36 hours of freedom, during which time he was chased by the media and abused by the public, to realise that as the most hated man in Ireland he needed the State to protect him. He presented himself at Kevin Street Garda station, in south inner city Dublin, on the evening of August 13th and has remained in residential care ever since.
Public and media interest in the 45-year-old father of two from Baltinglass has centred on his alleged involvement in the disappearances and presumed murders of a number of women in the Leinster area in the 1990s, though there is no evidence against him.
Fiona Neary, director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland, says that although the public concern around Murphy’s release is understandable, driving such high-risk offenders out of areas or into homelessness makes it much more difficult for the Garda to monitor them.
Pre-release risk assessment and post-release supervision need to become sentencing norms for such offenders, she says. “The option of a high-risk offender remaining in custody until there is a demonstration of reduction in harm should be available to the authorities.”
Neary also says more investment is needed in intervening in the lives of young people who exhibit problematic sexual behaviour, such as a keen interest in inappropriate pornography or inappropriate touching.
In the cases of convicted offenders who are jailed, the Sex Offenders Act 2001 enables a trial judge to include post-release supervision of a sex offender by the probation and welfare services, which usually obliges the offender to meet regularly with probation officers, and can also include compulsory treatment sessions.
But post-release supervision orders apply only to prisoners who committed their crimes after the Sex Offenders Act was enacted, so Murphy is not bound by such an order. The act also provides for the sex-offenders register, where sex offenders must tell the Garda where they are living, so they can be monitored. If the offender moves abroad, his new address must be supplied to the police there via the Garda.
The register applies to all offenders who were in the criminal justice system when the legislation was enacted, so Murphy is bound by it. But the Garda lacks the resources to monitor on a 24-hour basis the 1,100 sex offenders on the register. Instead an inspector has been appointed in every division to co-ordinate the monitoring of all offenders living in the area.
Every sighting of the offender and intelligence gathered on him by local gardaí is entered in the Garda’s centralised Pulse computer database. Over time a picture builds up of an offender’s lifestyle: the places he normally frequents, who he socialises with and so on. If it emerges he is deviating from his usual routine, Garda monitoring can increase, up to and including 24-hour surveillance for a time.
The local inspectors liaise with the Garda Sex Offenders Management and Intelligence Unit, which is responsible nationally for monitoring everyone on the sex-offenders register.
The Probation Service says it is supervising 150 of the 1,100 offenders on the register. The remaining 950-plus convicted sex offenders in the community are obliged to tell the Garda where they are living but are not supervised.
At present there is no electronic tagging in the Republic and it could only be used in the future to monitor sex offenders if imposed by a judge as part of an original sentence. So tagging could not be used to track Murphy unless as punishment for a future offence.
In the prison environment, a new programme for sex offenders, called Building Better Lives, consists of one-to-one assessments and group work. In assessments, offenders meet mental-health experts to discuss their pattern of behaviour, determine what triggers their offending and, crucially, assess their willingness to participate in group treatment. The programme is voluntary and it’s felt that only inmates who genuinely want to work on themselves to avoid reoffending will fully engage with treatment.
While most of the estimated 350 sex offenders in prison are housed in Arbour Hill, deliberately segregated from the wider prison community for their own safety, smaller numbers are dispersed through the system. A prisoner who is willing to participate in group sessions can transfer from another jail to Arbour Hill for them.
There are usually two groups of eight people meeting twie a week in Arbour Hill. They operate on a rolling model, meaning men join and leave all the time. “The idea is to have men in a group who have made a lot of progress over time and can assist new entrants,” says a mental-health expert in the prison system.
The treatment programmes are run by the prison service in conjunction with the Granada Institute, a therapeutic centre in Shankill, Co Dublin, which specialises in treating sex offenders. Dr Joseph Duffy, the institute’s director of clinical services, spent a decade as a clinical psychologist in the Prison Service and says the prison group sessions are key to the rehabilitation of sex offenders.
“The group would start with an offender telling his life story and giving an honest and open account of his offences. They would then discuss issues like victim empathy, risk areas in relation to their particular offending, triggers and anything else that essentially would help them to lead good lives.”
Duffy believes Arbour Hill prison is becoming more of a “therapeutic environment” because more men than ever are undergoing sex offender treatment there.
Experts say while the number of rehabilitation places (16 at any one time on Arbour Hills group session programme) seems low for about 350 sex offender prisoners, the treatment programme works best for those nearing the end of sentences, which is a relatively small number at any time.
Previously there were just eight places and the take-up rate has traditionally been low. The latest data available shows between 1994, when prison sex offender treatment began, and the end of 2007, just 128 had taken part in the programme.
Away from the prison environment, the institute offers the same 15-month programmes for sex offenders, and those at risk of offending, referred to it from a variety of sources. The courses involve men from all over the country meeting in the Shankill centre in groups for four hours one day a week.
“It is also important to involve a family member or a concerned other who could support the men in the community,” says Duffy.
While the Granada Institute programmes in in Arbour Hill and in Shankill are voluntary, the Lighthouse Project in Dublin and Cork runs treatment programmes for offenders obliged to attend as a condition of their non-custodial or post-release sentences. According to the Probation Service these can cater for two groups of eight in Dublin and one group of eight in Cork at any one time.
For teenagers exhibiting problematic sexual behaviour that may later manifest in sexual offending, there are two units in Dublin, at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin, and Temple Street Children’s University Hospital, and one in Galway.
Duffy says that while treatment options are improving, “ideally you would like to have more programmes and they would be seamless from the prison system into the community”.
Research published last year by the National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers estimated 3,000 sex offenders lived in the community, 90 per cent of whom had not been caught, as nobody had complained to the Garda or because of poor evidence. It bleakly concluded: “Current service provision is neither equipped to deal adequately with the current scale of the problem nor its likely growth.”
Key questions following Larry Murphy’s release
Did Larry Murphy kill Annie McCarrick, Jo Jo Dullard or Deirdre Jacob?
A major Garda investigation, Operation Trace, could find no link between any of the disappearances, presumed murders, let alone connect Murphy to any of the cases. However, in some people’s minds the woman Murphy abducted from a Carlow car park and raped in rural Co Wicklow in 2000 would have been murdered and disappeared just like the other women had his attack not been disturbed.
No other women went missing when he was in jail: how come?
Not true. A number of women went missing while Murphy was in jail and remain unaccounted for. These include Claire Boylan (36), from Terenure in south Dublin, in March 2003; Hope Osas (20), last seen in Dundalk, Co Louth, in November 2005; Bernie Gavan (59), last seen in Ballymun, Dublin, in August 2007; and Lyabo Bolarinwa (50), last seen in Lucan, Dublin, in February of last year.
Why was Murphy released early?
He wasn’t. Murphy served every day of his sentence. When jailing Murphy in 2001 to 15 years with one year suspended, Mr Justice Paul Carney would have known the entitlement of all prisoners to 25 per cent remission meant the actual time being imposed behind bars was 10.5 years; he would have factored in the remission. Murphy served exactly 10.5 years.
Didn’t the crime merit a longer sentence?
A life sentence would have ensured Murphy stayed in prison until his release was approved by the minister for justice of the day. However, during one case in January of last year Carney explained his reluctance to impose life sentences on rapists. On that occasion he said he wanted to impose a term of life on triple rapist David Hegarty (32), from Mahon in Co Cork, so he could not rape again. Instead he jailed Hegarty for 13 years, explaining that when he had previously jailed rapists for life the Court of Criminal Appeal later shortened the sentence. Two days after he made those remarks the Court of Criminal Appeal reduced to 12.5 years a life sentence that Carney imposed on another rapist during an earlier, unrelated case.
