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The Irish Times - Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Call for prison drug treatment centre

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PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

A DRUG treatment centre for prisoners needs to be opened in Ireland, Fr Peter McVerry of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin has said.

“This is what the site at Thornton Hall should be used for, rather than become the location of yet another prison. We should be developing at least one custodial drug treatment facility,” he said. Fr McVerry said the Irish Prison Service’s annual report published last week had showed that the service administered 20 per cent of the national methadone maintenance programme. He said this “should focus public attention on the significance of illegal drug use as a factor leading individuals to commit crime for which they are imprisoned – in many cases, a cycle repeated over and over again.”

As a regular visitor to Dublin’s prisons, he said: “In my experience, many people are willing to use the time they are in prison to try to address their drug problem. But prison is not a suitable environment for doing so, not least because of severe overcrowding.

“Rather than build more prisons, which does little to address the offending behaviour of people who have a drug dependency, we should be developing at least one custodial drug treatment facility.”

In a statement, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice expressed itself “deeply concerned about the deteriorating conditions in Irish prisons, in particular the 24.5 per cent increase in prisoner assaults between 2009 and 2010”.

Eoin Carroll, the centre’s advocacy officer, said that “of particular concern is the evidence in the (Irish Prison Service report of violence or a threat of violence within Irish prisons: during 2010, there were 1,014 assaults on prisoners by other prisoners, an increase of 24 per cent; 17 per cent of prisoners were detained under conditions of ‘protection’ – that is for extended periods – on the grounds that they were at risk of attack by others”.

He noted a 27 per cent rise in the number of sentences of less than three months, as compared to 2009 figures, and that 87 per cent (10,919) of all committals under sentences in 2010 were for less than one year.

While the number in custody on a sentence of less than one year represented “only around 15 per cent of the total prison population at any given time, the societal cost of these short sentences is enormous, including as it does the financial cost to the taxpayer and the serious implications both for those detained and for their families,” he said.

“The number of short sentences indicates that imprisonment, in many cases, is not being used as the penalty of last resort,” he said.

The Jesuit Centre, he said, welcomed comments by Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, following the publication of the (Prison Service) report, that: “prison overcrowding cannot be solved solely by building more prisons . . . further steps are required to reduce the prison population”.

It urged the Minister “to vigorously pursue an overall policy approach aimed at ensuring that, wherever possible, penalties other than imprisonment are used”