The Gazette 1983

GAZETTE

APRIL 1983

within this relatively small group of offenders the variety of types and needs is incredibly wide. There are the psychopathic, the mentally unbalanced, the deliberately disruptive, the politically motivated, the bully, the unfortunate who lost his head through drink and killed his father or mother or wife — all to be coped with by people who have no formal training in psychiatry, human relations, communication medicine, nursing, whose training may have been for six or ten weeks, whose selection may have involved no investigation of personality or attitudes, and who may have a confused idea of their role in relation to the prisoner and what is expected of them. Furthermore, while the prison officer has the most day to day contact with that prisoner and while he clearly occupies a vital role — a pivotal role in terms of how well a prisoner adapts or does not to prison life — he may find his significance being eroded by a cluster of so-called experts — who appear in the prison one day a week or a few hours a day — doctors, social workers and psychiatrists whose attitude to the officer may be remote and patronising. The officer may be the person expected to implement the advice of the experts — he takes on a treatment role, a therapeutic role simply because he is there. If we go back to the sieve we find that we are left with offences against property. Of every hundred crimes in that sieve only about 35 will be detected. Again the process by which some crimes against property will be resolved and some not is not so arbitrary as might appear. For example much will depend on police deployment — where the police are, how quickly they are on the scene — their ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS IN IRELAND The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland is a privately owned Institution founded in 1784. It has responsibility for postgraduate education of surgeons, radiologists, anaesthetists, dentists and nurses. The College manages an International Medical School for the training of doctors, many of whom come from Third World countries where there is a great demand and need for doctors. Research in the College includes work on cancer, thrombosis, high blood pressure, heart and blood vessel disease, blindness, mental handicap, birth defects and many other human ailments. The College being an independent institution is financed largely through gifts and donations. Your donation, covenant or legacy, will help to keep the College in the forefront of medical research and medical education. The College is officially recognised as a Charity by the Revenue Commissioners. All contributions will be gratefully received. Enquiries to: The Registrar, Royal College of Surgeons, in Ireland, St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2.

people to prison and nobody stops to enquire can the prison cope? When, as happened lately, the prisons become overcrowded and in an effort to alleviate conditions and prevent them from becoming intolerable, the decision is taken to release prisoners early, there is a public hue and cry — directed where? — at the prisons! And when the guy who is released burgles another house as soon as he is released, or robs a shop, the fault lies not with the society whose neglect and institutionalised inequalities have made a life of crime more attractive to him than a life in bored idleness on the dole — but the fault lies with the prison who didn't hold on to him, punish him, educate him, convert him, mould him into a model citizen, who on leaving the prison was happy to accept his lot at the bottom of the heap. It has become predictable for critics of the prison system to point to the high rates of recidivism as evidence of the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate. Even within the prison system itself there is a feeling of hopelessness about the viability of rehabilitation as recidivism rates from the institutions designed with rehabilitation rather than punishment as their primary objective like Shanganagh Castle or Glengariffe Parade, show no dramatic or appreciable improvement on the old faithfuls like St. Patrick's and Mountjoy. Yet, ironically I believe that if we are looking for scapegoats to blame for recidivism, there are more likely candidates than the prison itself. The operation of the Criminal Justice System If we take a broad and integrated look at the operation of the criminal justice system the entire process resembles a rather crude sieve. Into that sieve we put all crime. Give it a shake and out falls the crime we never know about — the white collar crime, tax evasion, employee thefts, sick benefit claimants who aren't sick, the bank officers who embezzle but who are quietly sacked but not prosecuted, the cross border smuggling, the larcenies nobody bothers to report, the drug pushers, etc. We probably live with a level of unrecorded crime which is astronomic by comparison with recorded crime. That leaves us with only recorded crime in the sieve — i.e. those offences known to the police. The police have limited numbers and limited resources. They never solve all the reported crimes, so give the sieve another shake and you are left with those they do solve. The crimes left in the sieve are not really the result of something so arbitrary as simply shaking a sieve — there is in fact quite a subtle form and substance to the likelihood of certain crimes being detected. For example the detection rate for crimes of violence is well over 80%. Violent crimes form only about 6% of all recorded crime and since they involve a direct confrontation between offender and victim the chances of detection are quite high. Also, of course, precisely because they are crimes of violence and thus more immediately of public concern, there is a greater incentive to detection, a greater need to allay public fears. We saw for example in England how huge resources in money and manpower were thrown into the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. N o one would expect the same commitment to apprehending someone who persistently steals shampoo and soap from chain stores. If we see prisons as places of containment and punishment then we would expect to see the violent and the dangerous being incarcerated, so no one bats an eyelid when the judge orders a custodial sentence. Yet even

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