NATIONAL OBSESSION WITH JAILING A 'SCANDAL' SAYS DEAN

Our national obsession with imprisoning more and more people is becoming a
scandal to the western world, according to the recently installed Dean of St
Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

At a ceremony to mark the opening of the new legal year, Very Rev Robert
MacCarthy said that apart from the "ruinous" cost of imprisonment at pounds
894 per prisoner per week, it simply does not work. The same people, almost
all of them drawn from a deprived under class, re-offended time and time again.

What we have in this country is retributive justice when what is needed is a
system of restorative justice, he added.

Dr MacCarthy pointed out that, apart from the North which is "a special
case," the Republic has the highest level of imprisonment per recorded crime
in the whole of Europe.

He was addressing members of the judiciary and barristers at a service at St
Michan's Church of Ireland, Church Street, Dublin.

Dr MacCarthy also referred to the lack of adequate treatment available for
jailed offenders. He said the sex offender treatment programme can cater
only for 10 inmates each year despite the fact there are some 280 jailed sex
offenders.

"The situation as regards drug abuse is even worse," he said. Although
two-thirds of inmates in Mountjoy prison have histories of heroin abuse and
almost half of prisoners there were found to be using heroin during their
sentences, a drug detoxification programme was started only in 1996 and the
numbers completing it were "tiny".

All informed opinion urged that the drug problem in Mountjoy is so acute
that it requires special measures such as the creation of a therapeutic
community within the prison, he said.

"But nothing effective ever seems to be done by any Government and the
reports of successive visiting committees are ignored," added Dr MacCarthy.

"It can hardly nowadays be a lack of resources would it even take the price
of Farmleigh to set up a full-scale drug treatment regime in Mountjoy?" he
asked.

Dr MacCarthy suggested the Millennium could provide an opportunity to take
stock of what justice might mean for Irish society today.

Meanwhile, in a homily at a mass in St Michan's Catholic Church, Halston
Street, Dublin, the Archbishop of Tuam, Most Rev Michael Neary, said there
was a danger the law, which ought to be an agent of liberation, could become
an enslaving element if it caused practitioners to classify and categorise
people in terms of the wrong they had done.

"Law is not intended to coerce or control but rather to enable people to
live in freedom," he said.