THE CURRENT financial crisis offers an opportunity to both save money on prisons and pursue a better prison policy, according to a leading expert on crime.
Dr Ian O’Donnell, head of UCD’s institute of criminology, believes the proposal to build a “titan prison” on the Thornton Hall site 16km north of Dublin, which would have a maximum capacity of 2,500 prisoners, should be abandoned.
Prisons work best if they are close to the prisoners’ home, he said. “While the 10 miles to Thornton Hall from Dublin’s city centre may be no great distance for the motorist, it is another world for prisoners’ families used to walking or catching a bus to the North Circular Road where Mountjoy Prison is located. This is not good news for the maintenance of family and community ties.”
Asked how the need to replace the existing prison in Mountjoy, which has been widely criticised, would be met, he said that a reorganisation of the State’s existing properties would allow for appropriate prison development, without the negative aspects of a “titan prison”.
He said that the site in Dundrum on which the Central Mental Hospital is situated is now not worth what it was when the new prison “campus” at Thornton Hall, to which the CMH would move, was planned.
“Sell 100 acres of the Thornton Hall site and put the CMH on the 50 acres left,” he suggested. “The CMH is a national facility for people all over the country, and a lot of those detained there won’t get visitors anyway. Re-do Dundrum for young offenders, it is well-served by public transport, then free up the spaces where St Patrick’s Institution now is at Mountjoy and rebuild the men’s prison.”
The policy of creating such big prisons was being abandoned in the UK, he said, and the view of them was “almost uniformly negative.” “Prisons work best if they are small,” he said.
“Large prisons need to be highly regimented and life within them has an assembly line quality.”
Dr O’Donnell’s analysis is contained in an article in Studies entitled The Harms of Prison, to be published on December 1st next.