The Gazette 1977

GAZF: ( I I-

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1977

PENAL SYSTEM SHOULD OPERATE WITHOUT

SEEKING RETRIBUTION

e v

r o f e s s o r

n d a

o n a g h

St. Patrick's' College, Maynooth.

Retribution should have no place in the Irish penal

system according to the Rev. Enda McDonagh, Pro-

fessor of Moral Theology at St. Patrick's College, May-

nooth. He was delivering a final paper to a special

Seminar on "Crime and Punishment" organised by the

Mental Health Association, Ireland, in December, 1976.

Professor McDonagh's assertion received very sub-

stantial support from the 80 delegates at the Seminar,

deluding psychologists, psychiatrists, criminologists,

social workers, clergy and others concerned with prison-

ers' welfare in this country. The support was given

Respite the fact that there had been little challenge

offered earlier in the Seminar to the opposite assertions

during the Seminar when he had said that society must

stop doing things to prisoners and instead try to do things

them. Simply putting someone in prison was to do

toany things to him; he lost his freedom, his name and his

identity and his personal security.

Dchumanisation in prisons

"If 1,150 people are being dehumanised in our

Prisons at the moment, despite the best will in the

World on the part of the authorities—and all the

evidence suggests that they are—then we are being

dehumanised as well, for they are our people and they

e in our society", said Professor McDonagh.

'If, in fact, we are just diminishing prisoners as

people we have to look very carefully at the whole

structure of our penal system and our prisons". Maybe

U would be better to do away with prisons altogether

nless the prisons became more humane institutions-

Professor McDonagh then spoke of how the vast

Majority of prison inmates came from the lowest socio-

economic groups in society. Referring to the largely

Middle-class participation at the seminar, he said: "Our

chances of becoming a prisoner are very small. We

don't have the ordinary option of criminal activity

?Pen to us for the most part, partly because of inbuilt

Mhibitions . • . and partly because we don't have the

^Me needs that criminals have".

These people were marginal people, he went on,

both Lord Longford and the Minister for Justice,

*ho had held that retribution was one of the principal

Actors integral to any penal system.

Irish society, for all its peculiarities, shared a great

u«al of both the wisdom and what might be called the

Unwisdom of the Western world, said Professor

r*cDonagh, and one thing it seemed to share was the

Uea of retribution as a justifiable component of pun-

j uinent. Rut he could not accept that retribution was

justifiable; rather, it was an obstacle to understanding

kind of penal system which many participants in

Seminar would like to see. (From the bulk of the

Ucussion, it seems likely that this would be a humane

rehabilitative system).

At the same time, Professor McDonagh went on,

i^c had to concedc the objectionable fact that retribut-

Was built into the present Irish penal system. It

j^s most often explained in terms of fairness : "In

ness, a person should be made to pay for what he

done". But, Dr. McDonagh asked, pay what, and

Whom? It was felt, he continued, that there must be

proportion between a punishment and the crime

^ which it was prescribed. But it was not necessary

>reta

an element of retribution in order to achicvc

Retribution a fancy name for vengeance

Professor McDonagh regretted that many people

believed that retribution was a Christian idea. They

must have a strange notion of Christianity he said.

Retribution was just a very fancy name for peoples'

desire for vengeance and was not a reputable attitude-

The deliberate infliction of pain of any kind seemed

to him to be a form of retribution and was unaccept-

able to him. Yet, the whole panoply of the Courts before

which an offender might appear could have a most

inhibiting and painful effect on the person accused.

The amount of pain felt by a person from the moment he

was charged to the time he was eventually discharged had

been underestimated.

Professor McDonagh apologised for speaking as a

member of a group which believed that dressing up in

unusual clothing could have some significance;

but the appearance — "the extraordinary gear"

— and procedures of the court system did not, in

his opinion, uphold the dignity of the law; they simply

damaged some very vulnerable citizens. And the stigma

of a court appearance would linger in society even

when the defendant was found not guilty.

The people who made and enforced the laws were

from a different social class and if, as it seemed, the

vast majority of offenders came from a particular social

class then there was something seriously wrong in soc-

iety, said Professor McDonagh, adding that if society

was to have an effective penal system it might need

to have far more radical changes made in its structures

of society than it was now apparently prepared to ad-

mit

But it was not necessary to wait for such changes

before making some improvement in the prisons. They

should be made more humane and, as to achieving a

proportionality between a crime and its punishment that

could be done through a degree of public repudiation

and denunciation of the crime, rather than through

retribution. By maintaining a sense of moral outrage,

was the supporting suggestion from the Attorney Gen-

eral, Mr. Costello, who was chairman for the session.

Moral outrage was fine by Professor McDonagh as long

as it did not become just a cry for vengeance.

One other recurring theme of the Seminar which

Professor McDonagh picked up in his paper was the

absence from both lectures and discussions of people

employed by the Department of Justice- Time after

time, the delegates had complained—more often in

sorrow than in anger—of this absence. But, said Pro-

fessor McDonagh, they should remember that people

in the Department of Justice were people who

shared the same fears as anyone else and who

felt the same needs to hold on to their bit of power.

Indeed, they might well feel also that they were the

true custodians of the views of the Irish people. But

was it enough for Irish society simply to employ civil

servants and leave them to get on with it. "If we are

not all prepared, able and free to accept responsibility

for what happens to offenders in our society, then that

society is in a very poor condition", said Professor

McDonagh. The firs' thing to do then was to awaken

people to their personal responsibilities in this matter-

This, too, echoed another Seminar theme—the need

to arouse, even to contact, public opinion on the whole

question of what happens to criminals. Only thus, it

was felt, could there be hope of overcoming what Mr.

Seamus Sorohan, SC, had called the "siege mentality"

of the Department of Justice.

Dr- Liam Daly, the Eastern Health Board's director

of forensic psychiatry, noted that there was a need to

open up all of the penal services, especially those aimed