The planned closure of Shanganagh Castle detention centre runs counter to the philosophy and intent of the Children Act, argues Paul O'Mahony
The news that Shanganagh Castle is to be closed comes as a severe blow to hopes - raised by the Children Act 2001 - that the Irish juvenile justice system was at last to be reformed in line with modern concepts of best practice.
Shanganagh Castle, situated on the coast between Bray and Shankill, is the only open detention centre for young offenders in the State and has, since 1968, provided the system with an essential and appropriate platform for rehabilitative and educational approaches for convicted 16-to-21-year-olds. It is to be closed later this month, with no prospect of replacement by an equivalent facility.
The Children Act is based on a renewed faith in rehabilitation and early intervention; it is based on a now substantial body of reliable knowledge about what does and does not work. One of the best established principles is that custody without the support of educational and therapeutic programmes does more harm than good with young offenders. The closure of Shanganagh flies in the face of this new knowledge.
The Act was a long-overdue replacement for the 1908 Children Act, which set the age of criminal responsibility at seven years and underpinned the grim era of industrial schools and reformatories. Despite a plethora of highly critical reports, the State has treated the juvenile justice area with shameful neglect for almost 100 years.
In this period Ireland developed a self-contradictory juvenile system, with some positive elements like Shanganagh, but generally with an over-emphasis on punishment and deterrence and on detention in ill-equipped and unsuitable closed prisons and detention centres. Even now, close to 20 per cent of all Irish prisoners are under 21 - an extraordinary statistic by European standards, where frequently less than 5 per cent of prisoners are so young. The Children Act 2001 seemed to promise that the State's neglectful and socially detrimental approach was finally coming to an end.
While the Act quite rightly makes detention of children (defined as those under 18) a last resort, it also recognises that some children have to be detained and that these also deserve decent facilities and genuine opportunities for rehabilitation.
This is precisely what Shanganagh and its dedicated staff have been doing for many years. The focus of the institution has been on education and productive activity. It is well known that the 1,000 or so children who drop out of school every year before reaching secondary level form a hugely disproportionate number of those who come into serious conflict with the law. Shanganagh has a proud record of taking on the education of such youngsters and successfully teaching them basic literacy, numeracy and social skills.
Unfortunately, this is not how the Department of Justice sees it. The ubiquitously eloquent Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, spoke on the Marian Finucane Show two weeks ago and gave his rationale for the closure: it is, he said, simply too expensive. Scrapping it and selling the lands could provide much-needed money for new prison places.
This is ludicrously off the mark, if only because our closed prison system is one of the most expensive in the world, owing to the astonishingly generous prison officer to prisoner ratio and the huge prison officer overtime bill. More immediately, Shanganagh has room for 60 offenders but this number has been run down by the Irish Prison Service and now stands at 20. It is this under-utilisation of Shanganagh that makes it look expensive.
In Britain official calculations suggest that open detention centres are 2½ times cheaper than closed prisons. In Denmark, where two-thirds of all prisoners are in open prisons, it is twice as costly to hold a prisoner in a closed prison. It is disgraceful for the Minister and the Department of Justice to measure Shanganagh in terms of cash value as a prime piece of south Dublin real estate, while disregarding and undermining its inestimable value as a place of rehabilitation. The economic argument does not make sense from any angle. It would be so prohibitively expensive to replace Shanganagh with a similarly well-appointed and convenient centre that, in all likelihood, this will never be done.
But why is the Minister ready to sacrifice core principles of how we treat troubled and troublesome young offenders for short-term profit - and why is he allowed to do so with barely a murmur of protest? It is well known that money is no object when it comes to building prison places designed purely to punish and deter. The Government has in recent years spent vast sums to signal its "tough on crime" credentials: €9 million is being spent to set up a detention centre within St Patrick's institution for 20 14- and 15-year-olds - that is almost half a million euro per place.
This decision indicates the self-defeating inconsistency of the Government's thinking on juvenile justice and its lack of commitment to the progressive agenda announced in its own Children Act. At a time when the Government has set up so many consultative bodies such as the National Crime Council, the Special Residential Board and the National Children's Office, it is deeply ironic and utterly disheartening that it can so easily betray the principles of its own progressive legislation with no apparent process of consultation.
Dr Paul O'Mahony is a lecturer in psychology at TCD and author of Prison Policy in Ireland: Criminal Justice versus Social Justice