Crime and crisis in three easy election clichés

While budgets for various essential forms of social provision are being viciously and repeatedly slashed, the state seems to be able to find plenty of cash to fund some of its more punitive functions. Even though crime is not on the rise, the prison population in Ireland is exploding. Here Liam Herrick explains the looming crisis of an approach to crime that increasingly leans towards the hugely expensive and self-defeating option of incarcerating young working class people for often very innocuous offences.

We are where we are – Throwing money at the prison system

The analogy that prisons reflect the nature of a society, attributable to either Dostoyevsky or Churchill depending on your persuasion, gives us yet another framework to reflect on the dysfunctional governance that have brought us to our current sorry state. Two weeks ago, the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture published its fifth report on Ireland's places of detention. The report describes an overcrowded, violent and unaccountable prison system where basic sanitation, healthcare and rehabilitative services are being denied to a significant proportion of the prison population. Given that this leading human rights body's first report on Ireland was published in 1995, and that the principal problems in the system have been ignored or have deteriorated in the period since then, the story of the prison system provides an interesting parable for the moral bankruptcy of the Anglo-Irish Bank era.

The failures of prison policy were not down to a shortage of cash – quite the contrary. Between 1997 and 2011, the prison population doubled and prison spending increased even more. As part of a major programme of expansion, new prison spaces were added through the building of modern, well-designed prisons, but the increase in spaces was rapidly outpaced by prisoner increases – so overcrowding worsened. All this while ignoring inhumane conditions for staff and prisoners in older prisons such as Mountjoy and Cork.

Of course, the rise in prisoner numbers during this time was not due to rising crime; the increase in prisoner numbers was caused by a combination of tougher sentencing laws, an increase in Garda and court activity, and harsher approaches to less serious offences, a good deal of which can be traced to the penal populism of Justice Ministers Michael McDowell and, more especially, John O'Donoghue. The "strategy" of growing the system for no stated purpose culminated in perhaps the greatest monument to Tiger profligacy - Thornton Hall, a perfect storm of questionable property dealing, grandiose planning and shambolic execution, a super-prison for 2,200 prisoners flying in the face of the shift across Europe away from large prisons in favour of smaller, more manageable local ones. Now, €45 million later, Thornton may never see the light of day and the old prison estate is in crisis with no Plan B in sight.

Avoid the moral hazards – The need to punish the poor

The biggest problem facing the prison system is numbers: the prison population is increasing at 13 per cent per year. This is explained by two factors: first, the huge increase in the numbers being sent to prison for less serious offences. In 2010, 6,681 people were sent to prison for failing to pay fines, an increase from 1,335 in 2007. Dearbhail McDonald's book Bust juxtaposes the huge increase in jailing the poor for failing to hand over litter penalties against the complete failure to even investigate fraud, tax evasion or White Collar Crime (see IPRT Submission to Government White Paper on Crime). In many cases, it is local authorities that are prosecuting these fines, as was notably the case recently in County Meath, where several householders were ultimately sent to Mountjoy for leaving empty plastic bags and cardboard boxes at a bottle bin depot. Clearly underfunded State agencies are taking a view that minor fines must be pursued all the way to prison to prevent the appalling vista of non-enforcement. That this practice costs the State far more through Garda and prison service time seems to beyond the comprehension of those involved.

The second major factor in the prison number growth is the steady increase in the number of prisoners receiving long prison sentences for drug offences. Presumptive and mandatory sentencing laws, introduced nominally to hit major players in the drug trade, are increasingly filling up prisons with young men and women who are low-level players holding or moving drugs on behalf of others – just as happened in the US during the 1980s. When challenged on the ineffectiveness of this approach to the "war on drugs", the only argument that has been offered is that we need stiff penalties for the mules and the street dealers for some spurious and unproven deterrent effect – a "moral hazard" argument along the lines that if we don't send out a message, every working class 15 year old will be doing it. All the parties in the current election have committed to ending the fines problem – but it's hard to see any of them grappling with the bigger question of reforming drug laws, so expect more of the same. Drug offenders are now 25 per cent of the total prison population and rising.

It's the Economy Stupid - Planning for the Failure of Future Social Policies

Given current sentencing patterns, the fear is that the real prison crisis lies ahead. For the past two decades, Government has completely failed to understand the full costs of crime on society or to consider what could prevent it. Crime directly impacts on individuals, businesses and the State and the response to crime is also hugely expensive in terms of the criminal justice system. Convictions and imprisonment compound social marginalisation and further exclude offenders from the functioning economy, increasing welfare costs and reducing revenue income. If we make an analogy with health policy, we can prevent criminal justice "treatment" costs arising in the first place by targeting the risk factors associated with crime: prevention is cheaper and more effective than a supposed cure, which isn't working anyway. (Would we allow the Government to persist to throw money at a health treatment that only had a 40 per cent "success" rate in relapse?)

At a moment of economic crisis/collapse, it is striking that spending is still weighted to incarcerating more and more people (many of whose "crimes" are linked to poverty), while opportunities to save resources and reduce the impact of crime on communities are being ignored. In our submission on budget 2011, Spending Cuts and Crime Implications, IPRT highlighted a number of areas of public spending that are especially sensitive to risks of offending. Worse still, a budgetary process that is incapable of joining the dots between failures in one area of public policy and outcomes in other related areas, means that punitive cuts in health and education are likely to cost enormous amounts in exacerbated criminal justice costs in the future.

And it's not only spending on services that keep kids out of trouble. Structural economic inequality is the elephant in the room when it comes to projecting future crime levels. If we take the view that levels of crime in society are determined largely by the inequality in that society (a view which forms a central part of the thesis put forward in The Spirit Level), then we are faced with the uncomfortable truth that in an unfair recession, the economic opportunity offered by involvement in crime will make offending an ever more attractive choice for young men and women. (The failed response of the State to the trade in illegal drugs is only the most obvious sign of this trend.) The next Government has a choice: continue to waste resources on punitive responses to what are, at core, complex social issues – or take the once-in-a- century opportunity which now presents itself to radically rethink our responses to both criminal justice and social injustice, to make a better and safer society for all.

Image top via :DaR on Flickr.