Students of Loreto Convent, Balbriggan, got a brief and shocking insight into conditions in our jails on a recent visit to Mountjoy, as reported on yesterday's Morning Ireland. Unhappily, the treatment of our prisoners is much worse than they were able to discern and mistreatment goes far beyond conditions, writes Vincent Browne.
We have devised a prison system calculated to ensure the maximum recycling of the prison population, indifferent to the results for prisoners and society generally.
Were it the case that those who commit some of the most grievous crimes were imprisoned, then, inevitably, practices would be different. But we are indifferent to the vast avalanche of sex crimes and domestic violence and the mountains of tax fraud crime and crimes under the Companies and Competition Acts.
To divert for a moment from the prisoners issue, a survey undertaken by the Royal College of Surgeons on Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland showed that one in five women reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and in a quarter of those cases (5.6 per cent of the adult female population) the abuse involved penetrative sex - either vaginal, anal or oral sex.
One in six men reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and in one of every six cases of contact abuse, penetrative sex again was involved. In addition, one in five women (20.4 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual assault as adults and one in 10 men reported experiencing sexual assault as adults. (This is reported in the SAVI Report, by Hannah McGee, Rebecca Garavan, Maireád de Barra, Joanne Byrne and Ronan Conroy, published by The Liffey Press in 2002.)
The scale of sexual crime is vast. Were the perpetrators charged, convicted and imprisoned, our jail population would be very different. So too if the tax, company law and competition fraudsters were jailed. But we are concerned, mainly, with the crimes of the poor.
As has been shown by the criminologist Paul O'Mahony, the majority of prisoners in Mountjoy come from a few areas of Dublin - the north inner city around Sheriff Street and Summerhill, south inner city around the Oliver Bond Flats and Fatima Mansions, as well as Clondalkin, Coolock and Finglas. The vast majority leave school by the age of 15, they come from poor families and have no qualifications.
A recent survey of ex-prisoners, Getting Out, Staying Out, by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh, on behalf of the Dublin Inner City Partnerships, shows how we have contrived as a society to ensure that a high proportion of prisoners return to crime almost immediately on release, to be imprisoned again shortly afterwards.
The first immediate and obvious problem is that prisoners very often have nowhere to go on release. If they previously had local authority accommodation, invariably, they will have lost that while in prison. Many prisoners are alienated from their families, so when they are released they have nowhere to go.
The problem is compounded by two factors: invariably, they are released in the late afternoon when social services are no longer operating and hostels are full; and they are released with no money.
Many ex-prisoners admit that immediately on release they go back to crime, simply to get enough money for accommodation or for money to finance a drug dependency, which brings us to another problem.
In spite of high-profile "reforms" within the prison service, drug treatment programmes are hopelessly inadequate. There is a methadone maintenance programme in Mountjoy but prisoners can get on the programme only if they have been on a methadone maintenance programme prior to their incarceration.
But it is even worse. Even for those prisoners who get on the methadone programme while in prison, once they are released they often find it difficult to resume with the clinic where they were previously treated. Quite simply, there is no joined-up drug treatment programme and, of course, within the jail drugs are easily available.
Prisoners on release are entitled to social welfare payments but when released late in the afternoon social welfare offices are closed. When freed at weekends, released prisoners have to go weekends with no money and even then there are often delays in getting payments. So what are they to do?
The situation is compounded by the thoroughly inadequate health care available in prison and outside. Although HIV infection rates in prison are 10 times those in the population and hepatitis C infection is 100 times greater, treatment for these conditions in prisons seems woefully inadequate.
All prisoners are supposed to be examined medically on entering prison but the examination is cursory, with some medical staff avoiding even touching the prisoner, according to the Getting Out, Staying Out report. On release, many prisoners have no medical card and have great difficulty in getting one and even then some doctors and dentists refuse to treat them if they have HIV or hepatitis C.
And we wonder why the recidivist rate is so high in Mountjoy (around 70 per cent)? How different it would be if the many real criminals at large were jailed.