Making The Same Mistakes Over And Over

Here’s a question: why is it that we seem to be so determined to do the wrong thing? Why do we keep repeating the same old mistakes? And why are we apparently so thoroughly incapable of stepping back from what we have been doing, analysing the results and recognising that there is, there has to be, there simply must be a better way?

The Criminal Justice System in this country is in a horrendous mess. There is chronic over-crowding in prisons. Morale is low among prison staff. Hard drugs are readily available inside. There is very little happening in the way of genuine rehabilitation. Violence is an ongoing problem. Bullying is rife. The doors keep revolving. The rate of recidivism is acute. And there is no sign of it getting better.
Any half-aware, intelligent adult knows all of this already, and has known it for a long time. And yet, the authorities are determined to press ahead with policies which will lead to further over-crowding, more violence and higher levels of hard drug use.
How so? Well, on the one hand, many ordinary people, with no involvement in ‘crime’ whatsoever, are increasingly being sent to jail for defaulting on payment of their debts, clogging up the system when there are alternatives which are not being used.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, the range of offences attracting custodial sentences is being increased all the time, the better to ensure that there are more and more reasons to put ordinary citizens behind bars – where of course they can properly get to know well established criminals, drug dealers and addicts.
The introduction, over the past week, of a whole new raft of drugs offences in an effort to put head shops out of business is just the latest example. But it is typical of the crazy commitment to some twisted notion of Law and Order which has been at the heart of so called public policy in Ireland for the past twenty years or more – and which involves giving sweeping new, even more draconian, powers to the Gardaí.
And is there a shred of evidence that any of this brute oppression has been in any way successful in controlling the incidence of crime in Ireland? On the contrary. For a start, there is evidence that more crime is being committed inside prisons than ever before. And, in wider society, while in fact the extent of criminality has been exaggerated in the media, there is no meaningful sign that current policies are having any positive effect at all.
You would think that a straightforward recitation of these facts would inspire a bit of deeper consideration of the policies currently being pursued. But no. That would be too much to ask of the Department of Justice, the Courts, the legal profession, the Prison Service or the Gardaí. It would also be too much to ask of the media, who feed off the reporting of crime – and far too much, in particular, to ask of the crime correspondents who collude in so many ways with the Gardaí in promoting the whole cops-and-crims stereotype. Because, when you think about it, in many ways it serves the agenda of all of these vested interests, if the status quo is maintained.
Which is where a good Minister for Justice should come into play. But we don’t have one.

The Dóchas Centre was widely recognised as a model of what a women’s prison might aspire to. The regime there was humane and progressive. The essential commitment within the institution was to the idea of rehabilitation. The name itself is an indication of the objectives of those who ran it: rather than embodying the idea of prison as a form of retribution or atonement, it implies hope. And that was the spirit in which it was run by its director Kathleen McMahon.
A few weeks back, however, Kathleen McMahon resigned. She was concerned about the steady increase in numbers being thrown into the prison by a rigid legal system.
She was disheartened by the resulting over-crowding, and the fact that women were now increasingly being deprived of personal space, and that cells designed for single occupancy were now ‘housing’ two prisoners in bunk beds. The number of inmates in a prison designed to accommodate 85 had increased to 137. And the situation was getting worse rather than better.
She was conscious of the negative effects of this, manifest in a visible increase in bullying and in violence between inmates. And she was also deeply upset at an increase in the level of interference in the running of the prison. It was all too much and so she decided to walk away rather than preside over an intolerable situation.
Kathleen McMahon made her resignation letter public. In it, she warned that “self-mutilation, bullying, depression and lesbianism” would become rife among prisoners if problems weren’t tackled immediately. She also expressed concern about the availability of drugs – tranquilisers for the most part – despite the use of sniffer dogs in the prison.
It is clear that Kathleen McMahon is not a crank. Nor is she a radical. She was a deeply committed public servant and she has effectively been driven out of the system. This, you might think, is the kind of development which would have a considerate Minister for Justice thinking long and hard about what can be done to improve things.
And yet, nothing has been forthcoming from the Minister, Dermot Ahern.

It made a good headline. The rate of gun killings in Ireland is five times that of England, a report in the Irish Times revealed. A decade ago, the figures were almost identical. The figures were contained in a new study, Responding To Gun Crime In Ireland, conducted by Dr. Liz Campbell of Aberdeen University.
The findings in the study are stark. In 1998, gun killings in Ireland stood at 7.8% of all killings. In England and Wales, at 7.2%, the figure was similar. Since then the quota in Ireland has escalated hugely to 38.2% in 2008, while in England and Wales there has been a marginal drop: there (only) 6.8% of all murders and manslaughters involved firearms.
Now the cranks who ring phone-in shows and the crime correspondents who – perhaps with some honourable exceptions – are their journalistic equivalent will froth at the mouth and decide that this is even greater reason to give the Gardaí guns and get them shooting, to lock criminals up and throw away the key and so on and on and on.
But Dr. Campbell, who is an eminent academic with no axe to grind, came to very different conclusions entirely.
In her report, she says that the Government’s emphasis on tougher laws and longer sentences for those involved in gun crime is misguided and ineffective. She further argues that the Government’s response to gun crime, focusing on harsher sentences and the erosion of suspects’ rights while under arrest, represents an unduly narrow perspective. She points out that longer sentencing assumes that armed criminals consider the penalties and see harsher penalties as a deterrent – neither of which is true. She offers the opinion that more Gardaí are needed on the streets, especially in gun crime blackspots in Limerick and Dublin.
And crucially, she also points out that education is the key to keeping at-risk young men away from hard drugs and taking them out of poverty (and as a result free of crime).

As Dr. Garrett McGovern points out in this issue of Hot Press, the enormous and widespread popularity of head shops represented an unprecedented opportunity to see how a system of legalised, regulated drug use might operate. There was a discernible drift away from the use of certain illegal drugs. The profits of the illegal drug dealers were greatly diminished. And drug use was finally delivering tax revenue to the State.
Instead of intelligently monitoring and developing this promising model, the Minister for Justice and the Minister for Health Mary Harney have in one fell swoop handed the entire trade in drugs, in Ireland, back into the hands of the criminals who are responsible for the gun crime that Dr. Liz Campbell was so concerned about.
It makes no sense. Just as it makes no sense to put people behind bars for not being able to pay their debts. Just as it makes no sense to undermine the Governor of a model women’s prison.
So, hey, let’s keep doing it. If it’s wrong it must be right. Did nobody ever tell you that?