Justice minister says prisons shouldn't be 'clogged up' with shoplifters or people living with addiction

MINISTER FOR JUSTICE Jim O’Callaghan intends to enact legislation to increase the use of community sanctions for non-violent offenders so that they are not ‘clogging up’ Ireland’s prisons.

In an interview on Virgin Media Television’s The Tonight Show, O’Callaghan said that he wants to addressing prison overcrowding.

“It is extremely important that we have extra prison spaces. At present, we have about 5,000 people in prison, which is about 111% capacity. We need more spaces,” the minister said.

“I was out in Cloverhill Prison a number of weeks ago. There’s overcrowding there; there’s overcrowding in many of our prisons,” he said.

“What I can’t do is simply say we’re not going to put people in prison because of the overcrowding. If people are convicted of very serious crimes, whether they be knife crimes or murder or sex crimes or rape, there has to be a term of imprisonment for them, and we need to have the spaces there to be providing them with that term.

“I think we need to ensure predominantly that if we have prison spaces, they should be used for people who are violent. I don’t want to see our prisons clogged up with people who are in there for crimes of shoplifting or people who have addiction issues.

“They shouldn’t be in prison, but people who are violent and who are a threat to the Irish public need to be put in prison.”

O’Callaghan said that he wants to advance legislation on increasing the use of community sanctions for people convicted of non-violent crimes.

“I think there are people who are not violent who are in prison, and we need to look at alternative methods of trying to provide punishment for them. Community sanctions is one,” he said.

“I’m aware that in the women’s prisons, there’s a huge number of women who are in prison for shoplifting, and they’ve serious addiction issues that obviously they that needs to be addressed with the support of services.”

Asylum appeals

O’Callaghan also said that he wants the system for processing international protection applications and appeals to be “much faster”.

“Of the 14,000 applications that were processed last year, 70% of them were refused. Of that 70%, a significant proportion are appealed,” he said.

“Those appeals haven’t been heard yet. There’s always going to be a right to appeal. There’s an issue as to whether you’re entitled to a full oral hearing, which sometimes happens – like, if you have a case heard in the High Court and you appeal to the Court of Appeal, the witnesses don’t come again and give evidence, so I think we need to introduce processes that are more efficient so that the appeal process could be dealt with on a paper basis, if that is appropriate.

“That’s something that my department’s going to be working on in respect of the amending legislation to put in a new system for international protection.”