By vividly bringing to life the “bystander effect” and its attendant social forces, Keegan avoids these binaries of past and present and encourages us to ask whether we would say anything or, instead, turn a blind eye to pervasive institutionalisation in our own time.

On Tuesday, the Government outlined its spending priorities for 2025. I am not sure if past Budgets have ever been properly transformative—or even had the potential to reimagine a fairer society—but Budget 2025 has firmly put this notion to bed.

When campaigning finally begins in earnest for the next General Election, debates around criminal justice, policing and prisons will dominate. A key talking point for Fine Gael candidates will be the delivery of an additional 1,100 prison spaces in the six years up to 2030. With Fine Gael holding the Justice portfolio for over 13… Read more »

Rhetoric will inevitably increase as a “tough on crime” arms race will ensue between the three largest parties, with Independents upping the ante from local townhall meetings. At the very least, politicians need to stop identifying population growth as a predictor of future prison capacity. Maybe, instead of motioning to the public that their hands are tied, an honest response is that they want to put more people in prison for longer.

Fast forward five years, what are the CPT likely to find in relation to overcrowding when they visit Ireland later in 2024? In April last year, there were almost 200 prisoners on mattresses on floors, five times what the CPT experts found in 2019. During the summer, the Inspector of Prisons wrote specifically to the Minister for Justice in relation to these “degrading conditions” as mattresses were adjacent to toilets. By any criteria of inspection, the experience of imprisonment by many will have greatly deteriorated in the interim period.

The new prison testifies to a societal failure … [w]e have an obligation to provide something better than a brighter prison.

Most prisoners come into prison with an addiction issue, receive little or no help with their addiction, and leave prison with the same addiction issue. And we are surprised when they reoffend!

  This weekend marks Prisoners’ Sunday, a moment in the year prompting us to pause and consider the men, women, and children who inhabit our prisons and places of detention. People in prison are rarely the recipients of sympathy. Their concerns and travails barely register with the general public. In fact, public opinion on penal… Read more »

  Two weeks ago, I wrote about how the decision of the Department of Justice to not publish two Dóchas Centre reports undermines its stated commitment to combat violence against women. The stated justification was that the Minister was acting on legal counsel sought by her Department. We know a little more about the serious… Read more »