St Patrick's Institution is making young male offenders more dangerous to society than when they are first sentenced there, one of the State's foremost champions of vulnerable young men has said.
Fr Peter McVerry, who has just published a study of the regime at the prison, called yesterday for an ombudsman for prisoners.
He said St Patrick's damaged its inmates, and that conditions there had regressed over the past 21 years.
The institution is the only remand centre for men aged between 16 and 21, and caters for about 200 offenders. Between 60 and 70 of them are under the age of 18 and classified as children.
In an article in the latest issue of Working Notes, a publication of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Fr McVerry describes the prison as "a disaster".
He said yesterday that if society and the Department of Justice were serious about rehabilitating prisoners "this should obviously start at the start of their adult lives, when they are open, full of energy, full of enthusiasm and can be influenced one way or another".
However, says Fr McVerry, the prison "reveals the moral bankruptcy of the policies of the Minister for Justice".
"It is not a criticism of the individual prison officers, many of whom are immensely caring and work very hard to do their best for the young men, but it is a criticism of a system which locks up these young people, some of them children, for up to 19 hours a day."
Much of the other five hours were spent "mindlessly walking up and down a dreary, depressing yard with nothing to do except to scheme how to get drugs into the place to kill the boredom."
He said some of the prison officers "should be immediately dismissed" as they did "immense damage to the young people" with emotional and physical abuse.
The director of the Irish Prison Service, Brian Purcell, rejected the report as "out of date at best, or at worst inaccurate". The workshops in St Patrick's had been fully refurbished and were operational. "We are now in a position to offer constructive activity to all offenders in St Patrick's."
