There are many problems with living in a democracy – the worst form of Government aside from all the others, per Churchill – but the biggest might be the simple fact that public funds are always limited, and politicians only like spending public money on things that will get them votes.
Building a new playground in the local village might get you votes. Putting an extra tenner on pensions before an election might get you votes. But there are basically no votes in building a prison.
Building prisons is one of those things, after all, that nice respectable people simply don’t like to think about doing. It’s got the whiff of authoritarianism of it, because a Government that builds a brand spanking new prison is presumably building it with the intention of locking people up. And no politician wants the public to think that their highest priority is locking people up.
But not building prisons – Ireland has not built a new one in decades – has real consequences. Especially when the population has essentially doubled since we built our last one:
THE IRISH PRISON Service is using temporary release services to relieve continued overcrowding in the prison system, it has been claimed.
There are currently more than 5,200 people registered in the Irish prison system, even though the system only has capacity for just over 4,500 people.
The issue here is not only that the state is now releasing people who the justice system says should be in prison. That is an issue, of course, though one might hope that the prisoners getting temporary release because there’s no room for them are generally those not in jail for serious crimes.
Talk to any criminal lawyer, though, and they’ll tell you it’s much more than that: Judges in Ireland, they’ll tell you, will do almost anything to avoid sending somebody to prison largely on the grounds that there’s no space for any more crooks in the system. If you want to know why so many crimes result in inexplicably lenient suspended sentences, look no further than the figures above.
There’s also, frankly, discrimination at play: Because the state is legitimately terrified of somebody out on temporary release committing a rape or a murder, those in jail for “lesser” crimes get treated differently. A fraudster is much more likely to get temporary release than somebody inside for sexual assault. But is that just?
The fraudster, after all, is in jail for a reason. They’ve committed a serious crime, and they’ve harmed society.
Prisons were invented not as rehabilitation camps – that’s a relatively new interpretation of their role – but firstly and foremostly as a tool for keeping the public safe. If you are in prison, the state is essentially saying that your continued freedom is a threat to society. That’s the whole point: You’re in there, because having you in there makes the rest of us safer. So, what does it say about our safety when you are released because the prison is too full?
The other reason that prisons were invented was that they are supposed to be a punishment. That means, in essence, that you are supposed to suffer in prison. The point of it is that you should be miserable, with the intended aim that you might, in future, reform your behaviour in order to avoid being placed in that misery again. But what punishment is there for somebody on temporary release?
All of this has come to pass because successive Governments have declined to build a new prison, or new prisons. That decision has been accompanied, frankly, by the popular left wing delusion that reforming young criminals is better than locking them up. This theory of crime – as essentially an expression of victimhood by the perpetrator – places much more emphasis on blaming society for crime than it does in protecting society from crime. You’ll recognise the theory when you hear a politician talking about crime, and then mentioning “deprivation in working class communities”. What they’re saying, essentially, is that crime is society’s fault, and not the fault of crooks.
The end result of all of this is, naturally, more crime. Because younger criminals, rather than being punished with prison, are instead told that it’s society’s fault that they’re criminals in the first place. Which is not, when you think about it, a good way to tell someone that crime is bad.
The country desperately needs to rethink this, and particularly to rethink the “not building prisons” approach. Because we are now at the point where not only are criminals being released for lack of room, but where many aren’t going to prison in the first place.
That makes us all less safe. And it also makes crime a less risky choice of career. We are less safe, and crime is more attractive, entirely and solely because of the decisions of our politicians. And they should be held accountable for it.