The ongoing series of reports by this newspaper's Drugs and Crime Correspondent on the State's prisons and Mr Donald Taylor Black's illuminating television documentary, The Joy, have cast much light into the darkness: in an unprecedented show of glasnost by the Department of Justice - for which the Minister, Mrs Owen, deserves due credit daily life inside the prison service has been thrown open to public scrutiny. The picture that emerges from Mountjoy, St. Patrick's, Limerick and some of the other prisons is a bleak one. Most of this State's prison population is still housed in Victorian buildings which were designed to meet the needs of another age.
The situation in Mountjoy appears utterly hopeless; the prison is infested with drugs while the authorities struggle, against desperate odds, to deal with both the security and the health aspects of the problem. The drugs treatment facilities, though well intended, appear, scant and underresourced. And the security effort which includes the use of closed circuit television to identify those smuggling drugs into the prison - appears to be no more than a token effort to hold back the tide.
The adjoining St Patrick's Institution, which should present an opportunity to rehabilitate young offenders, hardly gives hope for the future; it is now routinely acknowledged as no more than a "training centre" for Mountjoy. Inevitably, many of its inmates - one third of whom are aged between 16 and 18 years - will graduate to much more serious crime.
There is a strong overall sense that prison policy, like other elements of the criminal justice system, has been allowed to drift without any clear direction. Pressure on space means that prisons can no longer even be relied upon to perform their primary task of containment up to 50 prisoners are released from Mountjoy every day to relieve the congestion. But the prison service also fails to perform its rehabilitative function welfare and counselling services have never been given due priority and remain underfunded. And the recidivist rate in the State's main prisons is estimated at an astonishing 70 per cent.
It is, by now, something of a ritual to blame the Department of Justice for all of this. But there are much firmer grounds for pointing an accusing finger at successive governments who have failed to acknowledge the pressing need for prison reform and failed to provide the necessary funds.
Some solutions appear obvious; since the largest proportion of prisoners comes from relatively small pockets of Dublin, there is a clear need to target these areas for educational, employment and social funding. There is also a desperate need for a major purpose built drugs treatment facility for prisoners. And there is a pressing need for a comprehensive programme to resolve the accommodation crisis; little progress can be made until the pressure on space is eased. Mrs Owen hopes to provide 800 additional places by 1999 as part of the current £135 million building programme but, on current trends, even this may not be enough.
All these decisions require political courage and a still greater investment of scarce public funds. The establishment of the new Prisons Board which will take day to day control of the prison service, provides a unique opportunity to break the logjam in prison, policy and to set new, longer term objectives. The political parties, however, also need to rouse themselves on the issue and to move beyond the usual platitudes. The series of open media visits has exposed the grim, complex reality of prison life. It is to be hoped that they will also provoke some fresh thinking.