Lynn Ruane: Prison Won't Reduce Violent Crime - Here's Why

Thank you Lascaire-Loch. Minister, I welcome many of your comments today. I think some of the stuff I've said before, but I will repeat, I think the concept of prison, a lot of people have said here today, prison will always have a place in our society, and there's something I feel quite, that that's quite defeatist in terms of reducing offending to the point that there isn't violent crimes, and that might seem naive, but my hope for humanity and how we develop as people is actually looking at the car drivers of those most violent crimes as well, so that we're not just accepting them as this is going to happen in society so we will always need prison, and that's not a soft on crime approach, that's a reducing the instances of violent crimes in Ireland, so we actually, we do ourselves out of prison systems, so it might seem like pie in the sky thinking, but for me it's about reducing the amount of victims that exist in the first place, to break the cycles of victimisation. 77% I think it was in 2024 of new committals were sentenced to less than a year, 77% of people are in prison for such minor crimes that they do not warrant a sentence above six to 12 months. Nobody gets intervention in a prison in six to 12 months. You do not access school within six to 12 months, you don't access addiction counselling within six to 12 months, so we are basically warehousing 77% of people in big buildings across the country and then we're saying we have a rehabilitative system, when they are literally just warehoused, like in a massive factory that's doing something that nobody knows what it's meant to be doing. You know, it's so concerning because we have to be able to separate people's individual behaviour, that we want to interrupt individual behaviour so that they're not offending, but to actually separate that out from the broader picture is, to actually have a safer society, we have to think beyond the individual behaviour. So when we send somebody to prison for a period of time, it doesn't actually make society as a whole safer, that's a justice piece, that's a victim's rights piece, it's a justice piece, somebody has committed a crime. But actually in wider society, imprisonment has never reduced criminality and I've used the reference before in Albert Camus' book, The Philosopher, the guillotine, people were literally beheaded on front squares as a warning for people not to commit crimes in a public spectacle way and people still committed crimes. So it actually doesn't reduce offending, so it's like how do we actually get to the root causes? There's two books that I read a couple of years ago by Professor James Gilligan, he's a psychologist in some of the most high lockdown prisons with violent offenders in the States and one of his books is called Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others, I think it's what it's called, so it's looking at that structural violence piece and actually under say the Democrats and the Republicans over a hundred year period, neither of them when in power actually reduced the amount of violent crimes that were committed in the country, they slightly reduced under Democrats but not enough for it to be significant. But that actually when hard on crime rhetoric and sentencing and structural violence goes up, that actually, if you look at the violence in America, one of the harshest penalty systems in terms of three strikes and you're getting big long lengthy sentences and the amount of people in prison in America, it's still one of the most violent places but it has some of the most harshest laws when it comes to committing crimes. So we see that that doesn't work. So what we need to go back to then is looking at the fact that a large portion of people in prisons experience poverty. Now I know for many of us we'll go to the addiction piece but addiction is actually a symptom of the poverty. We need to actually go back another step from addiction and drug use to poverty and that actually poverty is one of the core drivers. It's not deterministic, so it's not just because you experience poverty that you're, no, it's determined that you will end up in prison but what it is is it creates the conditions where you are going to encounter particular experiences that may end up with you experiencing the criminal justice system. So we have to go back and look at the structural inequality that exists in relation to poverty. We have to be able to reduce poverty in a country that on the one hand is saying it's so wealthy but the inequality is entrenched and deep in certain communities. Prison has played a funny role in my life, my entire life. I must have been only about 12 years of age when I started questioning the concept of prison. As a 12 year old, if you can start to think about it in this way, it has to be possible for whole governments and society to begin to think about it a different way. I wrote an article about it before but it was based on all the letters that I received as a teenager from my friends who would have been sent to Overstown and my friends that would have been sent to St Pat's, children put in an adult institution in St Pat's and how they were treated there. But all the letters, there was a common theme which basically was when I get out and there was this aspiration of these teenage boys, when I get out I'm going to go to outreach or I'm going to go back to school and get my junior cert or I'm going to try and get a job and there was these aspirations and I remember looking at that going how does that not materialise then when someone actually gets out. So it's that agency of an individual trying to correct its own individual self with the little agency they actually have in an environmental situation. So it's the institution versus agency of an individual. So we can talk about the rehabilitation of individuals all we want but if we don't correct the conditions that actually contribute to the offending in the first place, you go back out into the exact same conditions and the structural force of poverty and the structural force of inequality is so big that it's not going to take very long before your individual agency as a person to try and do better is completely consumed by that structural inequality and those barriers and everything that exists and gets in your way of actually being able to have any sort of power to change your individual circumstance. Because if you had the power to change your individual circumstance you wouldn't have experienced the amount of poverty and trauma and dropping out of school beforehand because you would have done it then. So we have to also go when we look at rehabilitation of an individual what does rehabilitation of society look like? What does rehabilitation of the equality of one's conditions and how do we begin to address that? Because if we don't do that prison will remain a feature. All the evidence says that violent crime especially is driven by shame, humiliation and not being able to meet one's economic needs. So I want to believe in a world where we reduce those violent crimes and reduce having to see the amount of victims that we see and the loss of life that we see. Shame, you don't reduce shame by dehumanizing people in prison and having them to go to toilet in front of each other and sleep on mattresses and not be able to access health care. You actually compound the shame. You actually increase the chances of somebody becoming more violent. You know what I mean? That's not, that's the opposite of what we want to achieve. So I suppose Minister I'm really obviously hopeful in looking at the community sanction system. I would like to look at community courts broader than drugs courts, community courts in general. I visited them in in New York and Red Hook and stuff and there's some great models but I think we need to be ambitious and I don't think we should be prison will always play a feature. We should be working very very hard to make that not a reality.