A key element of independence is learning best practices from around the world (and learning from mistakes too), so it’s worth taking a look at the current situation surrounding prisoners and rehabilitation in different countries.
I’ve opted for a range of different administrative arrangements including control by the central government, devolved/federal state control, shared responsibilities and others.
I’ll start with a summary of how things are in Wales to set a marker for comparison.
For clarity, the “reoffending rate” generally means the proportion of convicted criminals (custodial and non-custodial) who are re-convicted within 6 months to 3 years of release/conviction – though some nations may count this differently.
The most appropriate comparisons in this exercise are perhaps Scotland and Ireland – which have been covered in a bit more detail than the others.
Irish prisons have a fairly poor reputation. At the start of the 2010s, they come under heavy criticism from the Council of Europe and social policy experts for supposedly “inhumane” conditions ranging from overcrowding, outdated facilities and an overemphasis on security that wasn’t doing much to prevent issues like drug-taking1.
It’s perhaps worth putting that in context. Ireland has had to deal with internal terrorism and has – for a country of its size – a fairly pronounced problem with organised crime and gangs. Combined with the social conservativism of previous generations, it would have all fuelled a political necessity to appear to be “tough on crime”, lending itself more towards brutalisation and punishment than rehabilitation (as it has here to an extent).
More recently, some Irish criminal suspects in the UK have appealed against extradition on the grounds of the “inhumane” prison system2.
Some of the problems may simply be down to the age of the Irish prison estate itself; the “newest” prison is more than 20 years old and some prison sites have been used for 200 years (with refurbishment and redevelopment).
Ireland also has a very high recidivism/reoffending rate compared to the rest of Europe, though this could be down to differences in how reoffending is counted as there’s no clearly defined international standard. Ireland seems to have a longer time period in which they count reoffending than most countries.
In response to this, Ireland has developed targeted interventions for the main group of reoffenders – men aged under 30. Ireland also places a very heavy emphasis on education in prisons with a fairly broad range of classes available in pretty much every prison up to university level.
Young offenders (mainly under-18s) are instead housed in residential detention schools, with a new single national facility having opened in 2016. While it’s still technically a prison, it’s arranged as and formally viewed as a school.
The annual budget for the Irish Prison Service in 2019-20 was just under €409million (around £340million) (pdf – p12).
Overall, despite all of the problems in the Irish prison system, their imprisonment rate is still half that of Wales.
1: Warner, Kevin (2014). “Regimes in Irish Prisons: ‘Inhumane’ and ‘Degrading’: An Analysis and the Outline of a Solution,” Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies: Vol. 14.
2: Irish Times (January 22nd 2022). “Suspects in UK citing ‘inhuman’ Irish jails to try halt extradition”. Available here: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/suspects-in-uk-citing-inhuman-irish-jails-to-try-halt-extradition-1.4781894
