Government urged not to 'build its way out of overcrowding' and invest in prison alternatives

Ottoline Spearman

Prisons are "buckling under the pressure" of overcrowding and rising numbers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons has warned.

In an interview with BreakingNews.ie, Mark Kelly said that problems are getting steadily worse, and Ireland is following the same pattern of “chronically overcrowded” prisons seen in England and Wales.

My Kelly said that the State is “attempting to build to solve the problem, and that simply doesn’t work.”

“The Government has made a huge commitment in terms of capital investment in the prison service… but most importantly, no comparable jurisdiction has ever succeeded in building its way out of overcrowding,” he said.

Prisoners are forced to sleep on mattresses on the floors of overcrowded cells, while the number of prisoners is outpacing the services that prisons are able to provide - including mental health facilities, and rehabilitation and education programs in prison.

There is a need to reappraise where the money is being spent and to reallocate investment in bricks and mortar to investment in people and community supports for people and for supervision.

“The sheer pressure of numbers means that the number of people who can access structured activity, and in particular work of vocational value, education and training, is diminishing,” Mr Kelly said.

“Almost [no prisons] are able to offer education places or work and training places to all prisoners who would want to avail of them.

"You have groups of prisoners who I would describe as involuntarily unemployed in prison, spending their time in very restricted regimes with very poor out-of-cell times."

He said this was essentially a resourcing issue, as prison staff were often redeployed “to other functions, like escorting people to court or hospital appointments, and that can lead to closures of schools and closures of workshops”.

The Office for the Inspection of Prisons (OIP), which Mark Kelly leads, recently published a damning report on the state of prisons, which showed that many prisons are at breaking point.

Reinforcing the independence and effectiveness of national monitoring is a step that Ireland urgently needs to take.

Mr Kelly said that women's prisons were some of the most overcrowded in the country, with Mountjoy Women's Prison at 151 per cent capacity, while Limerick Women's Prison - opened in October 2023 - is already at 155 per cent capacity.

"A great deal of thought has gone into the design of that prison, but already rooms that were meant for single occupancy have camp beds or sofa beds in them.

"The pressure on numbers is leading to a reduction in the activities that can be offered to women.

"So the aspiration of that prison - that it would take a trauma-informed approach to the care and custody of the women living there - isn't being realised because of the overcrowding issue."

Prison deaths

The report also found that last year, 34 prisoners died in custody, which is the highest since the OIP began its investigative role in 2012.

While Mr Kelly said that prison deaths had been lower this year, at 14, he added that "overcrowding certainly played its part in increasing the risks".

"The committal process for prisoners can't include a detailed risk assessment that would lead to people being placed in places where they're safe.

"When someone first comes into prison, the number of options of places where they could be accommodated is very, very limited."

Ireland remains “a complete outlier” as the only EU member state and the only one of 46 Council of Europe states that has yet to put in place a National Preventive Mechanism -  an independent body to monitor all places of detention where people are deprived of their liberty.

This includes prisons, Garda cells, psychiatric units, care homes, and immigration detention.

Despite ratifying the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture - which requires a state to form an independent body - in 2022, Ireland has yet to do so.

The OIP currently reports to the Minister for Justice, with all reports reviewed by him, which can delay the findings. Mr Kelly said that the OIP is waiting on five reports to be reviewed by the Minister as of March this year.

The Inspection of Places of Detention Bill is intended to form a National Preventive Mechanism and give the OIP the authority to publish its own reports once enacted, but it is still in draft stage.

“Reinforcing the independence and effectiveness of national monitoring is a step that Ireland urgently needs to take,” said Mr Kelly.

Instead of building more places which are quickly filled by rising numbers of people being sent to prisons, Mr Kelly thinks that non-custodial alternatives to prisons are one of the solutions, especially for those who are serving short prison sentences.

In 2024, 75 per cent of prisoners served sentences of 12 months or less, according to the Irish Prison Service's Annual Report 2024.

Mr Kelly described short prison sentences as "massively costly", and "effectively serving no purpose whatsoever in terms of rehabilitation or community safety".

The Irish Penal Reform Trust has estimated that the average cost of a prison place is €100,000 a year.

Mr Kelly said: "I think that there is a need to reappraise where the money is being spent and to reallocate investment in bricks and mortar to investment in people and community supports for people and for supervision."

The Criminal Justice (Electronic Monitoring) Act 2022 sought to expand the use of electronic tagging as a non-custodial alternative to imprisonment, and as a supervision tool for those on bail or temporary release, but its rollout has been slow.

Mr Kelly emphasised the need for additional training for the judiciary on the benefits of non-custodial sentences, as well as further investment in support for probation and community service options.

But what is really needed, said Mr Kelly, is a decisive act of "political courage" to place a limit on the maximum number of people who can be kept in any one prison - a decision that would rest with Minister Jim O'Callaghan and his department.