Reading Prison Policy in Ireland: Criminal Justice versus Social Justice is like watching the author, Paul O'Mahony, unload a machine gun into the vista of the criminal justice system. Nothing is spared attack and, to be fair, there is no shortage of "legitimate targets".
In this pamphlet, part of the Cork University Press Undercurrent series, O'Mahony coherently outlines what he sees as the many problems evident in the Irish prison system - an endemic drugs culture with some prisoners taking drugs for the first time while behind bars, the extraordinary cost of our penal system (the annual cost of keeping someone in prison for a year running at £50,000, with 80 per cent of the prison budget spent on wages and overtime), insanitary conditions, limited medical, psychiatric and educational facilities, prisoner suicides. All these illustrate the "yawning gap" that exists between the aspiration of the prison system - to send people to prison as punishment, not for punishment - and the reality. At the same time O'Mahony describes prison policy as a failure in terms of deterrence and reform.
For O'Mahony an underlying problem is the overuse of imprisonment in Ireland. Even as crime rates are falling, prisoner numbers are increasing. The result is chronic overcrowding. The current construction of new prisons is aimed at alleviating this, but there is a very real possibility that the only result will be more people sent to prison. O'Mahony highlights our failure to turn to more fruitful modes of punishment, such as the community-based Restorative Justice programme.
In the true spirit of a pamphlet, parts of this publication are clearly polemical. As the author admits, it paints a "relentlessly negative picture". While the system fails on many counts, it is deeply ironic and surprising that it is only as prisoners that some people are given dignity, rights and respect. Indeed this pamphlet is published at a time when the prison system may be turning a corner. Although O'Mahony is suspicious of what he describes as the current "enlightened managerialism", recent improvements - including the establishment of an Irish Prisons Board and the opening of the new Mountjoy women's prison - slightly take the sting out of his critique. As implied by the sub-title, O'Mahony believes that the prison system should be used as a means of redressing the imbalances of society. He tries to show that with a more enlightened attitude we will be better off, both as a society and individually. These sentiments are noble. One wonders about their impact in the brash new Ireland.
The penal system is a vastly under-researched topic. This pamphlet is excellent at documenting its failures. While his argument is somewhat undermined by a one-sided approach the smug, contented, self-centred Ireland of today surely needs people like O'Mahony to rattle its cage.
Tim Carey's book Mountjoy: The Story of a Prison was published earlier this year