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GAZETTE
APRIL 1983
people to prison and nobody stops to enquire can the
prison cope? When, as happened lately, the prisons
become overcrowded and in an effort to alleviate
conditions and prevent them from becoming intolerable,
the decision is taken to release prisoners early, there is a
public hue and cry — directed where? — at the prisons!
And when the guy who is released burgles another house
as soon as he is released, or robs a shop, the fault lies not
with the society whose neglect and institutionalised
inequalities have made a life of crime more attractive to
him than a life in bored idleness on the dole — but the fault
lies with the prison who didn't hold on to him, punish him,
educate him, convert him, mould him into a model citizen,
who on leaving the prison was happy to accept his lot at the
bottom of the heap.
It has become predictable for critics of the prison
system to point to the high rates of recidivism as evidence
of the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate. Even
within the prison system itself there is a feeling of
hopelessness about the viability of rehabilitation as
recidivism rates from the institutions designed with
rehabilitation rather than punishment as their primary
objective like Shanganagh Castle or Glengariffe Parade,
show no dramatic or appreciable improvement on the old
faithfuls like St. Patrick's and Mountjoy. Yet, ironically I
believe that if we are looking for scapegoats to blame for
recidivism, there are more likely candidates than the
prison itself.
The operation of the Criminal Justice System
If we take a broad and integrated look at the operation of
the criminal justice system the entire process resembles a
rather crude sieve. Into that sieve we put all crime. Give it
a shake and out falls the crime we never know about — the
white collar crime, tax evasion, employee thefts, sick
benefit claimants who aren't sick, the bank officers who
embezzle but who are quietly sacked but not prosecuted,
the cross border smuggling, the larcenies nobody bothers
to report, the drug pushers, etc. We probably live with a
level of unrecorded crime which is astronomic by
comparison with recorded crime. That leaves us with only
recorded crime in the sieve — i.e. those offences known to
the police. The police have limited numbers and limited
resources. They never solve all the reported crimes, so
give the sieve another shake and you are left with those
they do solve. The crimes left in the sieve are not really the
result of something so arbitrary as simply shaking a sieve
— there is in fact quite a subtle form and substance to the
likelihood of certain crimes being detected. For example
the detection rate for crimes of violence is well over 80%.
Violent crimes form only about 6% of all recorded crime
and since they involve a direct confrontation between
offender and victim the chances of detection are quite high.
Also, of course, precisely because they are crimes of
violence and thus more immediately of public concern,
there is a greater incentive to detection, a greater need to
allay public fears. We saw for example in England how
huge resources in money and manpower were thrown into
the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. N o one would expect
the same commitment to apprehending someone who
persistently steals shampoo and soap from chain stores.
If we see prisons as places of containment and
punishment then we would expect to see the violent and
the dangerous being incarcerated, so no one bats an eyelid
when the judge orders a custodial sentence. Yet even
within this relatively small group of offenders the variety
of types and needs is incredibly wide. There are the
psychopathic, the mentally unbalanced, the deliberately
disruptive, the politically motivated, the bully, the
unfortunate who lost his head through drink and killed his
father or mother or wife — all to be coped with by people
who have no formal training in psychiatry, human
relations, communication medicine, nursing, whose
training may have been for six or ten weeks, whose
selection may have involved no investigation of
personality or attitudes, and who may have a confused
idea of their role in relation to the prisoner and what is
expected of them. Furthermore, while the prison officer
has the most day to day contact with that prisoner and
while he clearly occupies a vital role — a pivotal role in
terms of how well a prisoner adapts or does not to prison
life — he may find his significance being eroded by a
cluster of so-called experts — who appear in the prison
one day a week or a few hours a day — doctors, social
workers and psychiatrists whose attitude to the officer
may be remote and patronising. The officer may be the
person expected to implement the advice of the experts —
he takes on a treatment role, a therapeutic role simply
because he is there.
If we go back to the sieve we find that we are left with
offences against property. Of every hundred crimes in that
sieve only about 35 will be detected. Again the process by
which some crimes against property will be resolved and
some not is not so arbitrary as might appear. For example
much will depend on police deployment — where the
police are, how quickly they are on the scene — their
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