McDowell seeks to make prisons free of drugs by early next year

The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, is to seek to make the State's prisons completely free of drugs from the beginning of next year.

In a major speech to a conference organised by Pace, the voluntary agency which works with former offenders, the Minister for Justice criticised what he termed the "moral fuzziness" on the part of those who urged the State to facilitate the use of drugs in prison.

The Minister also told the conference that he would be bringing proposals to Government which would allow the courts to impose "two-part sentences".

These would provide an incentive of earlier release for those who co-operated with rehabilitation or treatment programmes while in prison.

The proposal would allow the courts to impose a set custodial sentence with a separate period suspended in the event of the prisoner co-operating fully with treatment or rehabilitation programmes.

The Minister said that for example, a sex offender who had served a specific period of his sentence could be released earlier in the event of him participating in a treatment programme.

Department of Justice sources said last night that the early release would be conditional on the prisoner continuing with the treatment/rehabilitation programme while in the community.

In his prepared speech to the Pace conference in Dublin, Mr McDowell said that the Government was committed to eliminating completely heroin in the State's prisons.

He said this would be achieved through the introduction of mandatory drug-testing, increased measures to prevent drug usage, addiction counselling and treatment and a genuine system of rehabilitation.

He said the Government's original deadline for the publication of the new policy had been frustrated by the absence of appropriate prison rules and the prison officers' overtime issue.

However, he said the resolution of these matters would enable the policy to be published by the end of 2004, and that implementation would commence early next year.

Departing from his prepared script, the Minister said it was not acceptable for a regime to be put in place which condoned, supported or facilitated the abuse of hard drugs in prisons.

Not only was drug-use harmful to the offenders themselves, but it would have a corrupting effect on the system if authorities were to turn a blind eye to injection rooms.

The Minister said there had been arguments that things should be left as they are in prisons and that the use of drugs made prisoners docile. However he said he did not accept this for a moment.

In his speech, Mr McDowell also hit out at what he said was the inaccuracy that was "seeping into public consciousness" that Ireland had one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe.

Mr McDowell said this assertion was simply not true and that a recent Council of Europe study had indicated that the figure for Ireland was 75.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, while the average of the 49 countries surveyed was shown as 138 per 100,000 inhabitants.

He also strongly defended his planned prison-building programme.

However, criminologist Mr Paul O'Mahony of Trinity College Dublin, criticised the demolition of the Dochas Centre - the jewel in the crown of the Irish prison system - in an effort to increase the value of the Mountjoy complex which is to be sold.

"A centrally placed Mountjoy offers the best opportunity to maintain family and community links, which are essential to prisoners' well-being and future social integration," he told the conference.

"The potential commercial value of the site is plainly not a valid reason for moving from it."