The 13-year-old boy who appeared in front of Mr Justice Butler this week was living proof that crime doesn't pay. He rooted through his pockets trying to find £3 for his bail contribution, but failed. Someone had to give him the bus fare home. In the halls of Government, the Dail and the many tribunals parked all over Dublin city, evidence was starting to point to the contrary: crime may indeed pay. All you need to do is deny, forget, cast doubt - and wear a white collar.
The boy was placed in a holding cell while his betters decided what to do with him. At and around Flood, the protagonists returned to their well-appointed residences. Will they go to prison? Any of them? They don't look like criminals, or behave publicly as criminals are expected to. As a result, the political system is finding it difficult to deal with their offences.
Criminals are Not Like Us. The political, judicial and legal infrastructures appear to assume that tenet. The allegations made in the various tribunals are hard to prove and hard to punish because they are hard to recognise. The people involved, and the offences committed, don't fit the identikit pictures.
A typical prisoner's identikit picture looks very different from the middle-aged or elderly men appearing at the tribunals. The latter slip into their establishment background like human chameleons. They fit in so well that consensus can't even be reached on how to define their offences so as to stop them happening again.
As a result, debates about the difference between, for example, a bribe and a donation are starting to take on the features of theologians arguing about how many angels can fit on a pinhead. The paradox of these white-collar offences is that the perpetrators cannot be recognised because they are so familiar. They are Like Us. They appear to think and argue like us - to a point where even the Taoiseach is finding it hard to decide whether to expel offenders from his own party.
Typical prisoners are much more recognisable. The Council of Europe's 1999 picture of people inside the Irish prison system paints a general image of unskilled men and women who are notable for being one of the youngest, and poorest, prison populations in Europe. They share similar backgrounds and life stories which don't fit the dominant social models.
Youth identifies them. The median age of an Irish prisoner is 24. In Belgium it is 32, in Portugal 33 and in Sweden it is 34. A 1996 survey of a sample population in Mountjoy showed that 61 per cent of prisoners were either non-skilled manual workers or unemployed.
In Mountjoy, only 3 per cent of prisoners surveyed fitted the class of those who now appear before the tribunals. In the outside world, the professional/managerial class at that time accounted for some 13 per cent of the population. That does not imply that younger, poorer people are more likely to commit crime, as the stereotypes would have it. It implies instead that the system is better able to detect the kind of offences they commit.
You could argue that there is a lack of longstanding legislation and ethical codes within which to place professional/managerial crimes because the people involved did the unthinkable. No one expected these classes to behave like this, the argument goes, which is why the relatively few systems available for detecting and penalising them are either new or still being formulated.
But the question of how they will be sanctioned is less assured. It is not that the prison system cannot accommodate them. The Government has sponsored one of the biggest prison-building programmes in the history of the State. Eight months ago, the Minister for Justice announced that within two years of taking office, he had created an extra 1,200 prison places already and intended to create some 800 more.
Even in a worst-case scenario, it is hard to believe that 2,000 politicians, developers, business people and healthcare professionals will be eventually found guilty of criminal acts or criminal negligence if legal action follows the work of the tribunals.
Penal reformers challenged the Minister's wisdom in emphasising incarceration as the touchstone of his justice policy. Dr Ian O'Donnell, director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, asserted that there was no evidence Ireland needed more custodial places and wondered why the Minister thought differently. Current justice policy made it hard to see whether prison was intended as a place of punishment, of rehabilitation, or as a way of indicating to the rest of us that some offences were completely intolerable.
The Minister's own expert reports also raised critical policy questions. Various judges, prison officers and probation workers supported the Expert Group on the Probation and Welfare Service which recommended that the Government should implement alternatives to custodial sentences. It did not.
It would be a strange coincidence if the Government decides to pilot such alternatives on the white-collar perpetrators who are now rocking the political system, and who will go on to rock the judicial and penal systems, too. Sabrina Walsh got six years for stealing a tourist's handbag. If sentencing policy is to be applied consistently, the bagmen and the men who filled those bags could expect more.
In olden times, corruption was called evil. You wanted money, preferably fast. Out of the blue, a devil appeared and offered you buckets of cash in return for your soul. A 13-year-old boy with empty pockets can't be expected to know the story of Faust. A political system in crisis needs to understand every word.
mruane@irish-times.ie