How to recruit more Catholics to work as prison officers will be part of a major review of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, according to the head of the North's prison service Robin Masefield.
Mr Masefield made his commitment after SDLP Assembly member Alban Maginness said that fewer than 9 per cent of the 2,000 personnel working in the North's prison service are Catholic.
It was also disclosed yesterday that it costs 2½ times as much to keep a prisoner in the North as it does in Britain.
Mr Maginness said he was alarmed at the 9 per cent figure, which he elicited in answer to parliamentary questions. He said it showed "gross religious imbalances" in the service. "Worse, the figure has not improved at all in the last five years. The prison service cannot even say when there will be a balanced workforce. Why? Because there is no recruitment - so there never will be a representative prison service in our lifetime," added the North Belfast MLA.
"In order for the justice system to serve everybody equally, you need to have fair representation in every single part of it. Just as we need a balanced police service and a balanced judiciary, we also need a balanced prison service.
"A balanced workforce is a vital protection against sectarianism and unfair treatment. But unless something radical is done, it will never come about in the prison service," he continued.
"It is not surprising that there are hardly any Catholics in the prison service when there also has never been a specific audit of whether the prison service has a neutral working environment. Without a neutral working environment there is no chance of securing fair representation," said Mr Maginness.
Mr Masefield confirmed the figure and said it was about seven years since the last significant prison service recruitment drive. "We want to encourage a wider range of applications from the minority community, and others too," he said. He said the service would take initiatives to recruit more Catholics and to bring more women into the service. But overall figures hinged on when the next recruitment would take place, he acknowledged.
Mr Masefield said the issue of recruitment was linked to a new blueprint for the future of the prison service to be published before the end of the year, and which would cover prison requirements over the next 10-15 years.
Part of that blueprint would be based on a prison service efficiency review published yesterday. Most dramatically it revealed that it costs £85,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in a Northern Ireland jail compared to a cost per prisoner of around £30,000 in England, Wales and Scotland.
The report noted that there were more than twice the number of prison officers to each prisoner in the North as in England and Wales.
The current prison population is around 1,200 with a staff of 2,000. It said that wages in general were "significantly" higher in the North than in Britain with 80 per cent of the North's prison officers earning more than £30,000 per year.
"Given that staffing levels account for about 75 per cent of the prison service's total costs it is essential to look there for the greater part of any efficiency savings," the report added.
