One year in Portlaoise jail costs €232,000

It costs €232,100 a year to keep an offender in Portlaoise prison, the State's most expensive place of detention.

The cost for each offender in Portlaoise is more than twice the next most expensive, Mountjoy. At the Dublin prison the cost runs to €97,900 per offender, including the women's Dóchas centre.

The cheapest detention centre is Loughan House in north Co Dublin, where juvenile offenders are held at a cost of €67,700 a year per detainee.

The yearly total in Portlaoise is €25,400 more than in 2002 when it was €206,700. That year was also the first time that costs rose above €200,000. Portlaoise is the State's highest security prison and holds some of the most serious offenders and subversives.

Limerick Prison averaged €90,200 per offender. At Fort Mitchel detention centre offenders were housed at an average cost of €96,050.

Accounting for the costs, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, said they were based on the average daily number of offenders in the institutions during 2003. "The operational cost of each institution is based on actual running costs," he said including prison officer pay, overtime, food, light and heat, and maintenance. The Minister said the costs included items such as staffing numbers and utilities that were fixed "no matter what the number of offenders in custody is".

He released the information in reply to a written Dáil question from Fine Gael's justice spokesman, Mr Jim O'Keeffe, who had asked if the expenditure was "cost effective" for the State and effective from the prisoners' point of view.

Prison officer overtime has been a major bone of contention for many years with pay and overtime amounting to €214 million of the €300 million total prison service budget last year. Overtime averaged €19,000 per officer with approximately 3,200 prison officers in the service. The ratio of prisoners to prison officers was 1:1 compared to 1:3 for the UK and France.

Mr McDowell said the Irish prison service was constantly striving to ensure it delivers value for money to the State.

"In 2004, for the first time in years, I reversed the upward trend in prison officers' overtime and I achieved significant savings in overtime costs. . . In this context discussions between the Irish prison service and the Prisoner Officers' Association in relation to eliminating overtime are close to being concluded. I am hopeful that an agreement will be finalised shortly and that staff will ballot for acceptance." He said the service operated a "humane" regime with a high level of out-of-cell time and access to health, education, work training and psychology services.