Prisons and Alternative Sentencing Options: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-22 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin I welcome many of the Minister’s comments today. Some of this stuff I have said before, but I will repeat it. The concept of prison - many people have said today that prison will always have a place in our society. I feel there is something quite defeatist about that in terms of reducing offending to the point that there are no violent crimes. That might seem naive, but my hope for humanity and how we develop as people is that we actually look at the core drivers of those most violent crimes as well so that we are not just accepting them as being something that is going to happen in society and so we will always need prisons. That is not a soft-on-crime approach; it is an approach in which the instances of violent crimes in Ireland are so reduced that we do ourselves out of prison systems. It might seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking but for me, it is about reducing the number of victims who exist in the first place to break the cycles of victimisation. In 2024, some 77% of new committals were sentenced to less than a year, that is, 77% of people are in prison for crimes so minor they do not warrant a sentence above six to 12 months. Nobody gets intervention in a prison in six to 12 months. A prisoner does not access school or addiction counselling within six to 12 months. We are basically warehousing 77% of people in big buildings across the country and are then saying we have a rehabilitative system when prisoners are literally just warehoused as though in a massive factory that is supposed to do something but nobody knows what. It is so concerning because we have to be able to separate people's individual behaviour that we want to interrupt so they are not offending. However, to separate that from the broader picture and to have a safer society, we have to think beyond the individual behaviour. When we send somebody to prison for a time, it does not actually make society as a whole safer if that is a victim's rights or justice piece. Somebody has committed a crime. In wider society, imprisonment has never reduced criminality. I have referenced the book by Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine , before. People were literally beheaded on front squares in a public spectacle as a warning not to commit crimes and people still committed crimes. It does not actually reduce offending. How do we actually get to the root causes? I read two books by Professor James Gilligan a couple of years ago. He is a psychologist in some of the most high-security lockdown prisons of violent offenders in the United States. One of his books is called Why Some Politicians are More Dangerous Than Others . It looks at that structural violence piece and under the Democrats and Republicans, over a 100-year period, neither of them when in power reduced the number of violent crimes committed in the country. They slightly reduced under Democrats but not enough for it to be significant. As for when the level of hard-on-crime rhetoric, sentencing and structural violence goes up, if we look at the violence in America, which has one of the harshest penalty systems in terms of three strikes and you will get a big, long, lengthy sentence, as well as at the number of people in prison in America, it is still one of the most violent places. It has some of the harshest laws when it comes to committing crimes so we see that does not work. What we need to go back to then is looking at the fact that a large portion of people in prisons experience poverty. I know for many of us we will go to the addiction piece but addiction is actually a symptom of poverty. We need to take another step back from addiction and drug use to poverty. Poverty is one of the core drivers. It is not deterministic; it is not just because a person experiences poverty that it is determined he or she will end up in prison but it creates the conditions where he or she is going to encounter particular experiences that may end up with him or her experiencing the criminal justice system. 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 is so wealthy but on the other, 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. If a 12-year-old 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 based on all the letters I received as a teenager from my friends who had been sent to Oberstown and to St. Pat's, that is, children who were put in an adult institution in St. Pat's and on how they were treated. In all of the letters, there was a common theme. There was this aspiration among these teenage boys that when they got out, they were going to go to Youthreach or to go back to school and get their junior certificate or were going to try to get a job. There were these aspirations. I remember looking at that and asking how does that not materialise when someone actually gets out. It is that agency of an individual trying to correct his or her own individual self with the little agency he or she actually has in an environmental situation. It is the institution versus the agency of an individual. We can talk about the rehabilitation of individuals all we want but if we do not correct the conditions that actually contributed to the offending in the first place, the person goes back out into the exact same conditions and the structural forces of poverty and inequality are so big that it is not going to take very long before his or her individual agency as a person to try to do better is completely consumed by that structural inequality and those barriers and by everything that exists and gets in his or her way of being able to have any sort of power to change his or her individual circumstance. If you had the power to change your individual circumstance, you would not have experienced the amount of poverty, trauma and dropping out of school beforehand, because you would have done it then. When we look at rehabilitation of an individual, we have to ask what rehabilitation of society looks like. What does rehabilitation of the equality of one's conditions look like and how do we begin to address that? If we do not 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. I want to believe in a world where we reduce those violent crimes and reduce having to see the number of victims we see and the loss of life. We do not reduce shame by dehumanising people in prison and having them go to the toilet in front of each other and sleep on mattresses and not be able to access healthcare. We actually compound the shame and increase the chances of somebody becoming more violent. That is the opposite of what we want to achieve. I am hopeful in looking at the community sanctions system. I would like to look at community courts, broader drug courts and community courts in general. I visited them in New York, in Red Hook and so on and there are some great models. We need to be ambitious. I do not think we should say prison will always be a feature; we should be working very hard to make that not a reality. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-22