The Prisoners’ Rights Organisation was established in February 1973, 53 years ago, in Dublin’s Liberty Hall. The early 1970s were an interesting time of political and cultural flux and the Liberty Hall gathering was a mix of law students, trade unionists, political activists, former prisoners and interested members of the public.
The Irish prison system was antiquated and creaking under a dramatic increase in numbers caused largely by an overflow from the chaos in Northern Ireland. It operated on the basis of privileges rather than rights.
Moreover, the Rules for the Government of Prisons (1947) made it clear that the prison system operated on the basis of privileges for good behaviour and punishment for bad behaviour. Even the visiting committees, whose main function was to inspect the prisons, had extensive powers to punish prisoners – and they exercised them.
In the 1970s, there was a global interest in civil and political rights. The anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa, the Black movement in the US led by Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War protests, the widespread university unrest in Europe and the early civil rights marches in Northern Ireland, were about challenging injustices and the establishments that perpetuated them.
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Therefore, the inclusion of “prisoners’ rights” in the title of the new organisation founded in Liberty Hall in 1973 was determined in the context of the milieu of the time. The title was not likely to endear the organisation to everyone and a “prison reform” title might have garnered more widespread public support.
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However, it was felt that reform of a system based on privileges and punishments would be useless. A new vision and a new definition of imprisonment were required. Based on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was agreed that the sanction of imprisonment should be defined as the loss of a single right – the right to liberty. After the right to life, the liberty of the person is the most important human right.
Loss of liberty should be the ultimate sanction for criminality and should only be imposed for the most serious of offences. Everything would flow from that definition. Once the sanction was imposed, the prisoner should be entitled to enjoy all other human and civil rights and not be further encumbered by a system of penalties and privileges as operated at the time.
Thus, prisoners would have a right to education, to health, to vote, to get married and to humane treatment while in prison. Prisoners would be encouraged to embrace the full range of their entitlements within the constraints of the prison space.
When prisoners were taken from the courts to serve a sentence of imprisonment, they should first undergo an induction process. This would be handled by a multidisciplinary team which would be located in each prison. The team would advise each individual prisoner on the parameters of their prison sentence, on how best to employ their time for the duration of the sentence, to prepare for release and return to society and to avoid recidivism.
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With imprisonment defined as the ultimate sanction, it follows that depriving offenders of their liberty should be mainly the function of the higher courts rather than the lower courts. The district courts should be obliged to find alternative sanctions. Criminal legislation should be amended to include the widest range of alternative sanctions so as to inform and direct district court judges in their sentencing.
Existing alternative sanctions to imprisonment such as probation, community service, fines, suspended sentences, juvenile diversion programmes and antisocial behaviour orders should be updated and expanded. New alternatives such as restorative justice, electronic tagging and the Community Access Support Team project for offenders with mental health issues should be developed.
All judicial sanctions imposed by the State should be administered by the State and not farmed out to private agencies, as is proposed with electronic tagging. Adequate research and support services would have to be put in place and resourced to enable the broadest range of alternatives to prison to be made available to the sentencing judge.
The development of alternatives to prison is beneficial in its own right, but there is a particular urgency now as the prison population has far exceeded full capacity. Prisons are grossly overcrowded and, consequently, prisoners are subjected to inhumane conditions and harmful constraints. Imprisonment in Ireland is now no longer the loss of a single right – the right to liberty – but the loss of multiple rights. Thus, the sanction imposed by the courts is substantially aggravated by overcrowding.
In 1984, the government established a committee of inquiry into the Irish prison system under the chairmanship of TK Whitaker. The committee envisaged a situation arising in the future when the prison population would exceed capacity. Whitaker recommended that in such an event the government should not respond by building more prisons but should set up a body to explore the development and expansion of more alternatives.
Imprisonment is expensive, controversial and often counterproductive in its ill-defined use. Now is the time to accept and implement the Whitaker recommendations. Instead of embarking on an expensive new programme of prison construction, the Minister for Justice should embark on a new programme of developing alternatives to prison.
Joe Costello is a former Labour Party TD, minister of State for trade and development and founding member of the Prisoners’ Rights Organisation
