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Investigating Criminals: Why They Reoffend And What To Do About It
On any given day, one of the busiest places in any town will be the building that houses the District Court.
These complexes are routinely thronged with people on either side of the law. The ultimate intention is that the punishments meted out during the daily sittings are enough to ensure that the people facing charges do not come back.
For many, these rooms are the final straw or the embarrassing result of a once-off indiscretion.
However, there is a minority for whom these courts become an all too familiar function room.
People are paraded before the same judges as the courtrooms become the reluctant nursery for a succession of similar trips. These are the career criminals who become comfortable with the surroundings before, almost inevitably, graduating to face charges at a higher court.
Every day, reports from district courts run through newspapers such as this one, where the focus is justifiably on the most recent conviction and the punishments handed down.
However, these reports, as is evidenced by recent examples summarised across these pages, are also a testament to growing problem in the Irish justice system.
A cohort of convicts are not deterred by the sentences available to the courts.
This includes peoples who, despite more than 100 previous convictions, still find themselves back before judges, having committed similar offences — or worse.
Statistics released just before Christmas show that the rate at which people are inclined to reoffend after getting a conviction is worse than in other countries.
More than half of people who were convicted of a crime in 2008 were guilty of another offence within three years.
The trend was most evident in the relatively minor public order offences, but also a pattern in the most serious crimes in the statute book.
Sexual offences were the stand-out category for which reoffending rates were low among those sent down in 2008. However, these offenders were the exception rather than the rule.
The case studies detailed to the right reveal many of the issues which complicated the problem facing the prison and probation services, the courts, legislators, support agencies, and the families of those convicted.
There are serial petty criminals who can clock up scores of convictions for similar offences despite facing incrementally longer sentences.
There are those with persistent mental health and addiction problems who are bounced about the system as a testament to the State’s dismal record on mental health reform.
In the case of Jason Curry, aged 23, of Leighlin Rd, Crumlin, Dublin, who had 25 previous convictions, Judge Mary Ellen Ring remarked that his atrocious upbringing meant that he may never have had a chance.
In previous generations, the State’s answer to the potential hazards of poor family lives was to incarcerate from an early age.
Traveller families in particular were targeted by the “Cruelty Man”, a nickname given to the ISPCC, and were convicted of crimes at very young ages as a means of effectively splitting families up.
The result of this policy was generations of children imprisoned in violent industrial schools and residential homes, with scant support and little opportunity to lead normal lives.
The legacy of this policy jumps off the pages of the Ryan Report, and has caused protracted psychological problems for those affected.
When this policy was phased out in the 1980s and the State stopped seeing the criminal justice system as a childcare strategy, nothing took its place. The fate of one key institution in the intervening period charts this.
In 1985, economist TK Whittaker, in a report on St Patrick’s juvenile prison, said it was nearly impossible to expect young inmates to emerge better from this institution.
“Rehabilitation is not possible as the physical and environmental conditions are such as to nullify any personal developmental programmes. The facilities and services required could not be provided even in a renovated St Patrick’s,” his report read.
In 2012, St Patrick’s remained the go-to place for repeat young offenders until Judge Michael Reilly, the inspector of prisons, published a depressingly similar commentary of the place in June 2012.
“In St Patrick’s, I met many prisoners who complained that they would leave without in any way having bettered themselves. Prisoners in other prisons who had spent their earlier life in St Patrick’s told similar stories,” wrote Mr Justice Reilly.
“I am satisfied that this is true. It is an indictment of St Patrick’s that many prisoners leave without having had a chance to better themselves.”
Litanies of petty crimes may blight the lives of many young people, but chronic reoffending is not the preserve of the lesser offences.
Statistics show that there are the more sinister cases where repeat offenders spend long periods in jail only to emerge to commit similar or worse crimes
The 2008 recidivism figures were released by the CSO just before Christmas.
When he reviewed the report, Justice Minister Alan Shatter said they were unacceptable.
Mr Shatter said that the pressures on prisons had made it harder to support convicts in such a way as to limit return visits.
“I am aware that increases in prisoner numbers, in recent years, has placed great pressure on the Irish Prison Service and has limited its capacity to deliver appropriate rehabilitative services to prisoners aimed at reducing recidivism,” said Mr Shatter.
“Our prisons are not intended to be mere warehouses for criminals and I am confident that recent initiatives introduced by the Irish Prison Service such as the Incentivised Regimes Programme and the Community Return Programme have resulted in a prison system with an increased emphasis on rehabilitation.”
However, long-term projections are of little use to those who the figures show are almost in a hurry to offend again. For the class of 2008, two thirds of those who reoffended did so within six months of their initial conviction, although these figures are weighted by the imbalance created by the volume of young men who found themselves back in court versus young women.
However, even within those figures, the notion of a deterrent seems alien in some cases. In the most serious category, homicide, 47% of people who were convicted of an offence in 2008 had reoffended by the end of 2011.
Given the serious nature of the crime, the overall number of people in this category was small, but the second crimes were still serious and included murder threats, robbery, and dangerous acts.
In another violent area, assault and murder threats, people were most likely to reoffend by breaching one of the public order acts.
However, 10% of those convicted in 2008 of this type of crime went on to be convicted of another, similar offence within three years.
It is worth remembering that many of those who are sentenced for such crimes have spent, at the very least, a significant portion of that three-year study period in prison.
An area of particularly pronounced recidivism has been those found guilty of theft and burglary.
In both categories, more than half of those who reoffended within three years found themselves charged with either a theft or burglary offence on the second occasion.
Separately, a recent study by the Irish Prison Service found that this group of criminal had by far the highest recidivism rate.
It is easy to characterise criminals at the moment of conviction and judge them only on the gravity of the hurt they caused.
However, each judge, in the District Court and above, must also consider the circumstances which led to each person getting to this stage.
Sentencing hearings are littered with stories of desperate upbringings, addiction, and illness. Many of the cases profiled on these pages include particular reference to problems in younger life, homelessness, and addiction issues.
Paul Sheehan, communications officer with the Simon Community in Cork, said it was a desperate reality that those who are homeless are more likely to be offend, and they are more likely to receive longer sentences.
He said it was also the case that people were being discharged from prison straight back into the care of homeless services, with no long-term accommodation plan or structure to help the person build a crime-free, stable life.
He said people who are homeless are less likely to find employment, more likely to have mental health problems, and will statistically be brought before the courts more often.
He said it is a complex issue but the facts were stark.
The Irish Prison Service, and the Probation Service, are aware of the problems and the challenges they face. Programmes such as the pilot community return programme, aimed at easing the transition from prison, are aimed at improving people’s prospects of building a crime-free life after a sentence. In the joint strategic plan for the two bodies for 2013 to 2015, they accepted there needed to be a complete shift in mindset.
“If we are to really succeed in reconnecting offenders back to their communities, then we must devise a model which involves a multiplicity of state, community, and voluntary agencies working in partnership on behalf of individual communities to bring about real change in the lives of offenders,” read the plan.
“For the majority of those incarcerated, similar criminogenic needs and risks exist, many of which are often interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Lack of employment, abuse of alcohol and drugs, anti-social attitude and companions, emotional and personal difficulties, poor educational achievement, family problems, and lack of housing or accommodation are prominent among them.”
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