 | ||
Since independence, the Republic of Ireland has enjoyed an extremely low rate of imprisonment in comparison with the rate when it was part of the United Kingdom. Recently, however, there has been considerable growth in its prison population. The Troubles in Northern Ireland led to a large spike in its prison population in the last third of the 20th century, which ended with the Belfast Agreement's early-release scheme.
Contents
Authority
In 1925, shortly after the establishment of the Irish Free State, the then Minister for Justice, Kevin O'Higgins, introduced legislation repealing the existing ability of grand juries to appoint visiting committees to Free State prisons. Instead, the authority to appoint the members of prison visiting committees was vested solely in the person of the Minister. Similarly, the management of the Free State prison system passed to the control of the Minister with the dissolution by statutory instrument of the General Prisons Board in 1928. Thus, by this date, both the responsibility for and control over the management and oversight of the Free State (later the Republic of Ireland) penal system was held by the Minister's department.
This situation remained unchanged until 1999 when the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, John O'Donoghue, established the Irish Prison Service to which was delegated the task of managing the day-to-day running of the prison system. Simultaneously in 1999 a Prisons Authority Interim Board was established and its members were appointed by the Minister in 2000. The purpose of this board was to advise the Director General and directors of the Irish Prison Service on the management of the penal system. In 2002 the retired High Court Judge, Dermot Kinlen, was appointed the state's first Inspector of Irish Prisons. However, none of these new bodies was ever established on a statutory basis despite indications to the contrary. As recently as January 2011, Dermot Ahern informed the Dáil that:
In 2009 the Irish Prison Service had an annual budget of €379.319 million and it had a staff of 3,568 people.
The Northern Ireland Prison Service is an executive agency of the Department of Justice, the headquarters of which are in Dundonald House in the Stormont Estate in Belfast.
Prison population rate
The prison population in the Republic was about 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in October 2015, and in Northern Ireland it was 78 per 100,000 in February 2016.
Prisons and prison population
There are currently 17 prisons operating in Ireland, with a total bed capacity of 5,609 in the late 2000s. While the daily average number of prisoners in custody in the same period was 5,348, most of these prisons currently operate at or above capacity.
Sentencing
In 2009 there were 15,425 committals to prisons in the Republic, which was an increase of 13.8% on 2008 when the equivalent figure was 13,557. 12,339 individuals accounted for all the committals in 2009. 10,865 committals to ROI prisons in 2009 followed sentencing.
Cost of placement
The average cost to incarcerate a person in a prison in the Republic in 2009 was €77,222. This was a decrease of 16.7% on the 2008 figure when the cost of incarceration was €92,717 on average.
Minors
Formerly, children in Ireland were detained in Industrial Schools or Reformatory Schools. Currently they are detained in institutions called Children Detention Schools. These detention schools are managed by the Irish Youth Justice Service. There are four facilities for the detention of "children", defined as boys under the age of 17 and girls under the age of 18: