The Gazette 1977

GAZF: ( I I-

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1977

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

PENAL SYSTEM SHOULD OPERATE WITHOUT SEEKING RETRIBUTION

B y R e v P r o f e s s o r E n d a M c D 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 ar 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 u 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, 10 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). Q At the same time, Professor McDonagh went on, i^c had to concedc the objectionable fact that retribut- a Was built into the present Irish penal system. It j^s most often explained in terms of fairness : "In ^ lr ness, a person should be made to pay for what he done". But, Dr. McDonagh asked, pay what, and t Whom? It was felt, he continued, that there must be fo proportion between a punishment and the crime ^ which it was prescribed. But it was not necessary tk >reta ' n an element of retribution in order to achicvc >