THE INTRODUCTION of new legislation to include a €700 fine or a month in prison for begging “will further criminalise the poor and add to an already over-stressed prison population”, the State’s prison chaplains have said.
They also called for postponement of the new prison at Thornton Hall “to allow for a proper debate on the prison system”.
In their latest annual report, the prison chaplain’s national head, Sr Imelda Wickham, asked whether “we as a society are willing to cut back on education, on health and social welfare but unwilling to cut back on prison expansion?”
The chaplains have expressed extreme concern about current overcrowding in prisons.
“That people are required to sleep on the floors of prison cells, as they do in Mountjoy Prison in the year 2008, is surely a human rights issue,” they said. They noted that “it is not unusual in Mountjoy for five men on 23-hour lock up to be housed in four-man cells or for two men to be locked in one-man cells for 23 hours”. Acknowledging that prisons were necessary for people who had committed the most serious of crimes and who were not willing to avail of alternative sanctions, they believed a reduction in the number of people sent to prison for the non-payment of fines and of those committed for short sentences for petty crime, would significantly reduce numbers.
They noted that more than 80 per cent of annual committals were for one year or less, according to the Prison Service’s own figures, while 60 per cent who were serving sentences for six months or less were mostly poor and often homeless people.
In the context, “new legislation on begging to include a €700 fine or a month in prison will further criminalise the poor and add to an already over stressed prison population”, they said. Also, many mentally ill prisoners were put in prisons as there was no current alternative.
Ireland has 21 full-time and five part-time prison chaplains, including lay people, nuns and priests.
