TWO PRISONERS are assaulted by fellow inmates every day in Irish prisons. The head of the Irish Prison Service said this figure is hardly surprising as there are almost 4,000 offenders locked up at any given time.
Brian Purcell, speaking at a conference in Galway yesterday, said that while no level of violence could be tolerated within the prison population, it was hardly surprising.
Mr Purcell, addressing the conference Alternatives to Prisonat NUI Galway, said there were 765 assaults by prisoners on prisoners last year with the prison service responsible for 1.3 million "bednights".
He said that any school headmaster would confirm the problem of violence with usually well-behaved young males.
“Yet in prisons we have young adult males with a multitude of problems, a history of violent offences, who are put in confined spaces, many of which date back to the 18th century – is it surprising we get such incidents?”, he asked.
He defended plans to build the country’s largest prison at Thornton Hall in north Dublin, which will be one of the biggest in Europe. Mr Purcell said the prison would cater for 1,400 prisoners in single cells and would have a maximum capacity of 2,200.
He said small, stand-alone prisons were inefficient.
“The most important point about Thornton Hall is that it is not a super-prison. It’s a super site, a campus development which will allow us to assess and categorise the prisoners and put them into the most suitable facility in order to have the most positive impact when they are released back into the community,” he said.
Fine Gael spokesman on justice Charlie Flanagan told the conference that the present approach to imprisonment lacked vision, was malfunctioning badly, and there was no incentive for prisoners to improve themselves, he insisted.
He said he was not laying the blame for problems within Irish prisons at the door of staff or the authorities but rather at a policy vacuum at Government level.
Fr Peter McVerry, who has worked with Dublin’s young homeless for more than 30 years, called for a care plan to be put in place for each prisoner.
He said that, in his experience, every drug addict at some point wanted to kick the habit but found assistance hard to come by.
“Figures have shown that 74 per cent of sentenced prisoners are drug- or drink-dependent. We need to actively look at tackling the problem rather than just locking people away,” he said.
Fr McVerry said that a care plan, which might see a drug addict undergo treatment instead of imprisonment, needed to be created for each prisoner and not just locking them up and hoping the problem would go away.