Delivered today, it holds that using a bucket is not of itself inhuman or degrading treatment. All of the circumstances of the slopping out and conditions of detention must be taken into account. This is in keeping with ECHR jurisprudence, but is to be contrasted with the recent Scottish decision of Greens.

Prison Law Seminar: ‘Creative Use of Legal Instruments’ | Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT).

Irish Penal Reform Trust, Irish Criminal Bar Association
and Dublin Solicitors Bar Association

With the Generous Support of the
Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The 8th in our series of Prison Law Seminars, co-hosted with the DSBA and the ICBA, on ‘Creative Use of Legal Instruments’ will take place at 5.30pm on Thurs 8th December, 2011 at the Distillery Building, Church St, Dublin 7. The seminar will be presented by Caoilfhionn Gallagher BL, leading prison law practitioner with Doughty Street Chambers in London, the Chambers of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Edward Fitzgerald QC.

Event details:

• Date & Time: 5.30-7.30pm on Thurs 8th December, 2011
• Venue: Distillery Building, Church St, Dublin 7.
• Fee: €20 (€10 students; no fee for former prisoners)
• Register online here. Alternatively, contact Mary Gaffney at 01-8741400 or email: info@iprt.ie

This Prison Law Seminar will be followed by a mulled wine and mince pie reception – so we hope you can start the Christmas celebrations early with IPRT!

About the Speaker:

Caoilfhionn Gallagher BL is a leading prison law practitioner with Doughty Street Chambers in London, the Chambers of Geoffrey Robertson QC and Edward Fitzgerald QC. Caoilfhionn is a human rights and civil liberties specialist, and has particular expertise in prison law and community care for children and vulnerable adults.  She is a Council of Europe expert on Articles 10 and 11 ECHR and she has co-authored a number of books, including the best-selling Oxford University Press textbooks, Blackstone’s Guide to the Human Rights Act (4th and 5th editions, 2007 and 2009), and Children in Need: local authority support for children and families (Legal Action Group, 2011).

Caoilfhionn’s practice is exclusively on the claimant side.  She is ranked as a ‘leading junior’ in public, administrative and civil liberties law by the UK legal directories, with particular mention given to her human rights work for adults and children in prison.  She has recently acted in a number of high-profile and sensitive prison cases, including a successful judicial review challenge to the Parole Board’s policies for Learco Chindamo, who was convicted of the murder of headteacher Philip Lawrence when a teenager; and civil claims for suicidal and self-harming prisoners ‘ghosted’ between prisons in 2009 to avoid them speaking to the Chief Inspector of Prisons.

Her prison cases cover all aspects of imprisonment and resettlement, including prison discipline and segregation, healthcare and disability, sentence miscalculations, homeless children leaving custody, deaths in custody, separation of mothers and babies, and ‘outsourcing’ of Ministerial obligations to private sector organisations such as SERCO and G4S.  She also regularly takes prison cases to Strasbourg, and acts for prisoners wishing to transfer jurisdiction (including many UK-based Irish prisoners who wish to serve the remainder of their sentences in Ireland).

Outside the prison context Caoilfhionn has recently represented bereaved families at the 7/7 inquests.  She is also currently acting in a series of test cases against police forces and other state bodies on behalf of the families of women killed by their ex-partners.

This seminar is part of an ongoing Legal Knowledge Exchange Project, run by the Irish Penal Reform Trust and Dublin Institute of Technology, and funded with the generous support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Would you like to support the work of IPRT?

Annual membership is just €10 for students, €40 for individuals, €80 for organizations/firms, and free to prisoners and their families. We can’t promise you lots of free stuff, but by becoming a member of IPRT you will be expressing your support for urgent penal reform in Ireland.

Why not consider becoming an IPRT member now?

6,688 people were sentenced to imprisonment for not paying a fine last year.

Watch the Primetime piece here.

There is a Department of Justice report on fine defaulting too, with further evidence and stories from those in this position.

On either calculation the prison overcrowding figures are worrying

The most up to date figures we have relate to June 20 of this year. Cork prison is operating at 209% of what the Inspector of Prisons says it should hold. The Dóchas Centre for women in Dublin is running at 152%. Limerick male is at 158% and female at 146%. This cannot continue.

There are no easy or quick solutions here. We need to divert those who do not need to go to prison away from prison, we need to re-examine our sentencing policies and we need to think carefully about what should be done with those who are addicted to drugs or who are mentally ill and who end up in our prison system. I was pleased to see that the Review Group set up to examine the plans for the new prison at Thornton Hall called for a strategic review of prison policy. This is essential to make sure we’re making the best use of our resources and to get some handle on prison numbers. While we are doing that we need to develop proper data and statistics on the Irish prison population. We need to know exactly what is causing this significant increase in the prison population. When we are planning for the future of prisons we need to project what the prison population will be like on the basis of what the effect of planned policies to reduce the prison population would be; it is possible to control the prison population and countries all round the world are starting to attempt to do so now. In the interim the proposal for early release to community service for some prisoners is sensible and necessary.

These proposals it can only be one part of an overall strategy. It is very important that we divert people who do not need to be in prison before they get there and the Government’s introduction of legislation to divert fine defaulters and to increase the use of community service orders is most significant and more cost effective than prison. We also need to reconsider aspects of our sentencing policy and to think carefully about what to do with those addicted to drugs and those who are mentally ill who end up in our prison system. The review group set up to look at Thornton Hall said we need a strategic review of prison policy and this is both necessary and urgent. The number of prisoners in our system is at its highest ever and both short and long sentences have been increasing.

However, in the interim and while waiting for these to take effect, a proposal to release carefully selected prisoners who would be suitable to do work in the community is a welcome one. Allows people to pay something back to the community instead of the huge cost spent on imprisoning a person and gives the system some breathing space.

There is understandable concern whenever prisoners are not serving the sentence imposed by the courts. This course of action is necessary because the levels of overcrowding have reached levels which can no longer be tolerated. The problem is now very serious with the number of people being sent to prison at its highest ever and the number of people receiving longer sentences increasing. It is not a proposal, I am sure which has been made lightly but because of these serious challenges.

With regard to selection, no system can be fail safe, but with the input of professionals, psychologists, prison staff and so on, the risk to the community is much reduced. The vast majority of all prisoners are going to be released at some time into the future anyway so the decision is simply being made a little earlier for some. There may, for example, be cases where a person’s conviction related to their addition to drugs and that might have been resolved by them while in prison, with further benefit to be gained through release. What is essential however, is that for this proposal to work is properly resourced programmes within prison to facilitate rehabilitation and proper supports upon release through the Probation Service. This proposal has the potential to be far better than unsupervised, unstructured release back into the community and will also enable there to be some element of pay back to the community.

In addition, there is another aspect to this: the potential for beneficial effects to arise out of reducing overcrowding. Overcrowded prisons are not ideal places in which to facilitate change and rehabilitation. Even in the US which has some of the highest prison rates in the world it has now been accepted by a number of States and the US Supreme Court in the Plata decision that reducing overcrowding may actually improve public safety because prisoners in overcrowded conditions do worse and may pose a greater risk of reoffending on release. Overall, these proposals are sensible, but can be only one element of a multi-faceted solution to a multi-faceted problem.

Read the transcript from Don Specter and Sara Norman of the Prison Law Office, Berkeley, California on the ‘inside story’ of how Plata came to be litigated and the US Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population.

You can also find helpful links regarding the Kinsella decision in which Hogan J found a breach of a prisoner’s right to bodily integrity arising out of his detention in a padded cell for eleven days.

Don’t forget to join IPRT and to keep an eye out for the Prison Law Bulletin it issues.

Hear Michael O’Higgins SC discuss the recent judgment in Kinsella v. Governor of Mountjoy Prison.

IPRT will host a seminar on prison conditions and constitutional rights on July 21 at 5pm in the Distillery Building.

Two very exciting topics will be discussed. First, the recent case of Kinsella in which Hogan J held that the detention of a man in a padded cell for 11 days with no proper sanitary facilities breached the constitutional guarantee of protection of the person (I will write more on this shortly). Secondly, Don Specter and Sara Norman of the Prison Law Office, California, will speak by video link about the Plata decision in which the US Supreme Court upheld a ruling that overcrowding in Californian prisons breached the Eighth Amendment and warranted a ‘population reduction order’ to reduce the prison population to 137.5% of the design capacity of the system.

This promises to provide a unique opportunity to hear from practitioners themselves about their involvement in two critical developments in prison law jurisprudence.