Dublin Opinion

The Irish fear crime with as much passion as they love property: no strange wonder, as both are based on speculation.

When it comes to irrational behaviour why hold back? Once you’ve committed yourself, make the tackle and hang the cost. And across the main political parties, regardless of the font size and headed paper, each press release contains the same automated calls: greater policing; tougher sentencing; more convictions; more prison places.

Crime speculation has attained ecumenical status – a rock of ages within the Irish political canon – and its motto is to lock ‘em up, and throw away the solutions.

But what is Ireland’s crime wave?

According the prison service’s latest report (2005 figures), at any one time, 20.6% of the Irish prison population is comprised of people serving six months or less for traffic offences, while 22% is comprised of people serving six months or less for “other.” No further breakdown is given; it is just listed as “other.”

However, the report does list figures for those serving sentences for crimes the public normally associates with prison: rape, murder, manslaughter, violence against the person, break-ins, etc. The figures below are totals, in that they contain the number of people serving time under each heading regardless of the length of time.

Murder……………………………………………………………………17
Manslaughter………………………………………………………….9
Sexual offences…………………………………………………….93
Other offences against the person……………………..570
Offences against property with violence ………………84
Offences against property without violence ……1,200
Drug offences………………………………………………………279
Road traffic offences………………………………………….1,357
Other…………………………………………………………………..1,479
Total……………………………………………………………………5,088

In a separate section, the report quotes the number of immigration detainees at 860 – presumably this figure is incorporated into “other,” as is, again presumably, bad debtors. Even with that, the number of immigration detainees held for three days or less is 484, with another 140 held for seven days or less, and only 62 held for more than a month.

Taken together, those serving six months or less for road traffic offences and “other” constitute 43% of those who served time in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. It costs around €90,000 to run one prison place for one year, and with an average prison population of 3,254 on any given day that gives a daily operational cost of €800,484, rising to €5,603,388 every week. Of that, €344,208 is spent on keeping traffic offences and “other” in prison, rising to €2,409,456 per week, giving an average of €125,635,964 spent every year by this government to keep road traffic offenders and “others” in prison.

That’s over one billion euro since this government took office in its first incarnation in 1997.

To stress again, “other” does not include most of the criminals cited by tabloids and politicians as a threat to our society. With regard to asylum seekers – who are, in all fairness to our politicians and tabloids, used to incite fear - the majority are held for less than three days, which begs the question why is the prison system – sorry our expensive and over-stretched prison service – used in this fashion, and at such expense.

Even for those putos for whom nothing is too bad for asylum seekers - who wish to see them as, I dunno, target practise for the FCA or toilet paper for the guards – we are still left with Ireland’s true crime wave: non-injury and minor traffic offenses, and bad debtors.

The cost of incarcerating traffic offenders alone - for offences gaining sentences of six months or less - runs to €7,719,480 per month, or €92,633,760 per year. That’s about 926 million euro since 1997.

And we’re building more prisons. Concurrent with that, the wage bill alone for the 2,000 extra guards promised by, well, everyone, works out at around 90 million euro a year.

Michael McDowell, whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command protrudes with venom on the body politic, sees his political salvation in his much-headlined crime bill. It will take away a judge’s discretion, and increase the number of mandatory sentences from one – murder – to over eighty. More prisoners, more custodials, more of a mess.

Instead of working to take prisoners out of the system, to alleviate stress on our justice system and enable it to concentrate on those who do constitute a threat to society – murderers, rapists, drug dealers, celebrity jigs and reels contestants– McDowell has gone down the short-term, low intelligence road. And he had five years to pick that log-jammed M50.

And it is on that point where the other political parties come roaring down, hogging the hard shoulder and trying to overtake the Justice Minister. No-one has had the foresight to say that, quite simply, we are sending the wrong people to prison, and doing it at an enormous cost.

John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy prison, tells the world at every opportunity that the majority of people he deals with in a professional capacity are there for non-payment of fines - sometimes, as low as fifty euro. At the same time the mainstream political parties scoop up crime in an orgy of fear and hysteria: a thousand demigods on golden seats, frequent and full.

Old Grey Whistle Theft from Fr. Ted.