Keith Adams

Keith Adams is Penal Policy Advocate at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice and a doctoral candidate at Leuven Institute of Criminology.

A PRISON MANIFESTO WITHOUT THE PRISONER

Charged with writing a manifesto for penal policy in Ireland, I mulled for a long time over how to structure such a document, or even where the emphases would lie. I couldn’t escape the nagging thought of whether such a document needs to even include the incarcerated men and women in our prison system. Would it concern the problem of the prisoner or the problem of the prison?¹

To focus on the prisoner and the need for an expansion of in-prison mental health supports, addiction services, education, or re-integrative services is to miss the problem of the prison, and tacitly shape the recommendations based on a deficit-focused understanding of the prisoner. This is not to devalue the provision of high-quality and needs-focused services in prisons. On the contrary, they are vital, but they mainly respond to day-to-day needs. Advocating for them belongs in a policy paper seeking incremental change. A manifesto is something different. This should be a document that pushes beyond the question of what could be possible now and, conscious of other perspectives,² sets an ambitious course for the future. With this in mind, this manifesto will focus entirely on the prison, and not the prisoner.

Penal policy, or the structures of all the various ways we administer punishment, is much too broad of an endeavour to cover fully in a short manifesto. Fines, probation, community service which includes unpaid work, curfews, compensation to the victim – these are a few of the suite of legal institutional punishments available. Others, such as electronic monitoring, are currently being tendered for and will undoubtedly become available soon.³ Yet, two interrelated views are important here. Firstly, the prison in Ireland is our reference punishment, as all other sanctions are compared to imprisonment and judged as either more lenient or severe against that measure. Prison has lost its status of being “exceptional” by becoming the norm, and the standard form of punishment which criminal law is based on. Secondly, if we first place limits on the prison,⁴ and take it off the low shelf where it can be easily reached, the way is opened for creativity and more just solutions when dealing with social conflict.

The steps laid out in this manifesto present a pathway towards a minimalist use of the prison in Ireland. A penal minimalist approach is the correct response to the period of penal excess⁵ currently being experienced in Ireland. I can’t claim it would lead to an ethos or praxis that is grounded in human dignity. Prisons are, by their design and social organisation, places of an “institutionally-structured violent context.”⁶ But it would mean prisons and prison staff would be accountable for their actions and decisions. These steps won’t solve everything, but they will take seriously the problem of the prison. While the manifesto does not discuss the prisoner, their experiences—cell-sharing, sleeping on floors,⁷ warehousing, and hygiene conditions⁸—are implicitly recognised as they are situated within this over-incarceration crisis.

I will outline four steps to limit the prison in Irish society: the creation of independent investigations; ending prison expansion; a maximum cap on prison spaces; and the closing of female prisons. Independent investigations are vital to know the prison; ending prison expansion and a maximum cap on population contain the prison; and closing women’s prisons will begin the process of eliminating the prison. I don’t believe any of this is overly radical or ground-breaking. Every part is easily defensible, but we have failed to notice our imaginations have become emaciated over time, resulting in more prison being the only solution for societal failures. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.⁹

INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATIONS

Institutions require oversight, especially institutions where people are deprived of their liberty. Much of the shift in prison oversight in Ireland, and at an international level, has been towards a focus on preventive monitoring. The attraction of this approach is self-evident at an intuitive level, but it can lead to deficits in the need for robust reactive monitoring through independent investigations, especially into deaths in custody or staff malpractice.

This domestic shift to identify environments, practices, and protocols which are liable to cause harm will likely culminate in the eventual creation of a National Preventive Mechanism (NPM),¹⁰ if the United Nations Optional Protocol of the Convention Against Torture is fully ratified. With the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission as the coordinating NPM,¹¹ the entire network will have preventative oversight of all places of detention, not only prisons.¹² Demonstrating the Irish State’s longstanding indifference to prison oversight and accountability, Ireland is the last country of the Council of Europe without a NPM, due to an ongoing 18-year delay to fully ratify the Optional Protocol.¹³ Despite Joint Committee on Justice scrutiny of the General Scheme of the inspection of Places of Detention Bill back in 2022,¹⁴ the drafted Bill is still not on the business schedule of the Oireachtas.¹⁵

At present, there is no independent oversight of prisons in Ireland. Independence of this type of function requires a number of different components, chief of which is the ability to publish inspection, investigation, and death in custody reports in a full and timely manner. With the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration having legislative grounding to redact key sections¹⁶ and hold investigative reports indefinitely,¹⁷ until either sufficient time has passed or fleeting public pressure builds, the publication or non-publication of reports depends on political priorities. This is a simulacrum of prison oversight but is not independent.

Beyond preventive monitoring, reactive monitoring through independent investigations remains crucial. These uncover systemic and cultural failures which remain invisible otherwise, particularly with deaths in custody. Deaths in our prisons are increasing, some because of a larger and older population, but others as a result of malpractice and disregard.¹⁸ While inspections may unveil issues which require change, deaths reveal systemic failures and unveil wider prison culture and practice in a way that an inspection report cannot. For example, an inspection report is unlikely to reveal the falsification of records and observation logbooks while a death in custody investigation will zero-in on this practice in the hours before or after a death.¹⁹ Deaths in custodies show in the most tragic way possible where prison policy, practice and culture fail, and should be treated as such.

Investigations of deaths in prison are spread across three institutions charged with different foci.²⁰ The Office of Inspector of Prisons may identify an issue but only in relation to its alignment with human rights standards.

In the death of Ivan Rosney in 2020, with the report belatedly published in a redacted form in 2026, the Inspector was able to raise the issues of a CCTV blindspot and injuries sustained during a control and restraint manoeuvre but nothing more concrete could be stated.²¹ An issue raised is not sufficient for the demands of justice. Deaths in prison investigations can’t provide for accountability in the cases of malpractice and carelessness. Families – and the deceased – deserve much more.²²

This demonstrates the need for a splitting of preventive oversight and reactive investigations into two different statutory bodies, based on an understanding that each role requires a different expertise, theory of change, and mode of engaging with prison authorities. Preventive oversight and monitoring should remain with an expanded Inspectorate of Places of Detention, though serious concerns²³ remain about whether the General Scheme of the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill “afford the Office sufficient independence to comply with the provisions of the OPCAT,”²⁴ specifically in relation to “financial and functional separation from the Department of Justice.”²⁵ While the future legislation may allow the new Office to lay reports directly before the Oireachtas, allowing the Office to bypass Ministerial intervention, a political naïveté may exist as there are other means to compromise independence and stymie statutory roles.

A fully independent statutory body, such as a Prison Ombudsman, is required urgently to investigate deaths in custody, publish these reports independently, and make binding recommendations. With the creation of such a body, the role of complaints investigation could also fall under its investigative ambit.²⁶ At present, all complaints are investigated by the Irish Prison Service, though the most serious Category A complaints are managed through external consultants.²⁷ While a new internal mechanism has again been long promised,²⁸ this addresses none of the key issues that arise from an institution investigating itself. Maybe an internal complaints mechanism can remain for Category C complaints and less serious, but Category A and B complaints²⁹ should be shifted to a thoroughly resourced Prison Ombudsman.³⁰ This would also provide an avenue for visitors and staff who witness
behaviour or conduct they deem necessary to report to a fully independent body.

ENDING PRISON EXPANSION

We are told repeatedly that we are in a prison “overcrowding” crisis but overcrowding is a redundant description. In relation to a confined space where too many people are present by design, I am unsure what overcrowding describes that crowding does not achieve.³¹ Yet this phrasing is ubiquitous in Government communication on the state of our prisons, underlining the need for immediate action as something worse than crowding is happening. But there is more happening with the choice of wording too.

Like the use of the passive voice which omits the driver when reporting road deaths, particularly involving pedestrians and cyclists, “overcrowding” does similar obfuscating work for the Irish judiciary and Department of Justice. When overcrowding is used to describe the current situation in our prisons, it suggests an inevitability or a natural occurrence while hiding the over-use of the prison as a state-inflicted punishment of choice. Over-imprisonment offers more clarity with the same number of words, and a few more letters.

Using “overcrowding” as the central framing device of our prison system primes the minds of civil servants and Ministers which are entirely formed by elementary economics of supply and demand. It becomes hard to imagine that anything beyond more prisons and more prison capacity could be needed. This is evident in the current Government’s commitment to build an additional 1,600 prison spaces by 2031,³² at a cost of €495 million.³³ Yet, such messaging and policy trajectory will further increase the use and length of prison as punishment by the judiciary as they will believe ample spaces are now being developed.

There is always money for prisons in Ireland. With any Government spending, the policy choice to spend half a billion euro on prisons is also a policy choice not to spend this tax revenue elsewhere. Holding this thought in our mind, two other things are undeniably true. There are much higher levels of mental ill-health, addiction, and homelessness among incarcerated men and women in Ireland than in the wider population. This is true the world over, when the criminal justice system is another component of a wider class conflict and the social control of the lumpenproletariat.³⁴ It is also true that community mental health services in Ireland are underfunded,³⁵ local addiction services are struggling with rapidly growing and complex community needs,³⁶ and the Housing First programme is on pause.³⁷

The reduction of policymaking to a crude “supply and demand” logic is not a bad thing necessarily, when applied to social services. If only it was applied with rigour and consistency, with our unrelenting levels of homelessness and rent rates being the key example, then some of our worst social problems would begin to be resolved. When this logic is applied to our prison system at present, the over 600 men and women sleeping on the floor³⁸ are viewed simply as a “demand,” which requires a supply of more prison spaces to solve the issue, with no acknowledgement that this will lead to an induced demand.

What happens, however, if we flip the application of the logic and instead consider that the men and women, three or four to
a one-person cell, are the “supply”, and the community development and support services are the “demand” element. To commit long-term and appropriate funding to the various community mental health and addiction services is to reduce the supply of people finding themselves in conflict with the criminal justice system. Would this half a billion being redirected to social policy interventions be sufficient? It is impossible to put a cost on decades of underinvestment and neglect of the communities which provide much of the “supply” to our prisons. Both the embedding of inequality and future spiralling costs should be anathema to our centre-right, fiscally prudent Government parties; rather the perpetuation of both issues will occur. Yet, to not address the demand at community-level is to further exacerbate social inequality and structural injustice, while committing to additional hundreds of millions to the cost of our prison system annually.

MAXIMUM PRISON CAPACITY

Coupled with ending the expansion plan for prison currently underway, a legally binding cap on the prison population is required to complement this step for those men and women already incarcerated. At present, the prison population is tipped by experts to exceed 6,000 men and women before the end of the year.³⁹ Like our homelessness figures, new records are being set each month with no media attention. To highlight the degree of over-imprisonment, the Irish Prison Service now publish the number of people sleeping on the ground each night.

To arrest this continuing overuse of imprisonment, coupled with the compounding negative impact on prison conditions, there is a need to implement a “one person, one cell” policy. In the prison estate, there are 3,560 cells⁴⁰ which if legislated as a legally binding cap on our prison population, would lead to a reduction in existing prison numbers and a corresponding improvement in prison conditions.⁴¹ This would be achievable within a reasonable timeframe, as demonstrated by the use of structured temporary and early release during the Covid-19 response which brought prison numbers down to a more manageable level. Increasing the level of ordinary remission⁴² on sentences to a third and enhanced remission to a half, while also removing Executive decision-making through Ministerial sign-off, would further speed up this decarceral approach.⁴³

In Oberstown Youth Detention Centre, Ireland already has an example of a maximum capacity in a place of detention,⁴⁴ where a suitable space must be available prior to a teenager being sentenced there.⁴⁵ This increased regulation could encourage the wider criminal justice system to seek alternative options, thus leaving prison as a legitimate place of last resort.⁴⁶ To simply seek the removal of short sentences of less than 18 or 24 months would inevitably lead to sentence inflation as no hard limit is provided. Rather, a legally binding cap on prison capacity insists on a parsimony in sentencing, where space must be retained at all times for the more serious cases before the Courts. A self-regulation of sentencing practice would be created where space would not be expended on the handing down of short sentences for shoplifting and petty offences.⁴⁷ If implemented, the prison capacity would have a limit of 3,560 people, which is almost 2,300 less people than current prison population but only 150 less than the lowest prison population during the pandemic response by the Irish Prison Service.⁴⁸

CLOSING WOMEN’S PRISONS

Women’s prisons offer an opportunity to both radically reshape a section of the penal system and experiment with other policy interventions. In recent years, female imprisonment in Ireland attempted a new approach to punishment through the adoption of the language of care. This resulted in the creation of Limerick Women’s Prison, a “trauma-informed” prison,⁴⁹ and the adoption of trauma-aware language by both Limerick and Mountjoy Female Prison. Yet, as a result of not placing any guardrails or limits to prison capacity, both prisons now have the highest levels of over-capacity.

When the aim of prison as punishment is obscured by an inflection of care and the utilisation of trauma language, the present growing rate of imprisonment of women is a natural consequence. Framed as a new approach to female imprisonment in Ireland, more and more women are now incarcerated while penal practice remains the same, though adorned with a more socially acceptable language.⁵⁰ When we stop talking about prisons as a place of state-inflicted punishment and retribution, replacing it with a discourse of care,⁵¹ the prison population will inevitably increase. This is a natural consequence of the public and judiciary beginning to understand female prisons as places of care.

Many women are imprisoned for non-violent offences related to addiction and familial provision.⁵² But prisons are not places of care, and never can be — rather they are places of institutional violence and victimisation, not conducive to restoration. With the inability to move beyond “supply and demand” logic, a new women’s prison within the grounds of the closed Cork Prison is being discussed for development. This will lead to three women prisons over-capacity rather than just two. When will we, as a society, know that we have imprisoned enough women in ostensible places of care, that the desired social control is realised? What future endpoint will indicate the need to stop? Will we even recognise it?

A radical minimalist approach to female prisons is required in Ireland. Politically, the State has proved itself untrustworthy in relation to the imprisonment of women, both historically⁵³ and in the present. More prisons will encourage these baser instincts. Socially, many of the women incarcerated are living lives of abject poverty and marginalisation, with imprisonment ensuring destitution and ostracization. Care giving responsibilities are interrupted, with the pain of familial worry amplified. Even for those women whose offence results in a death, the circumstances can involve a defensive element from intimate partner violence,⁵⁴ so highly unlikely to reoffend. This closure of the two women’s prisons would not happen overnight, rather it is a vision of a future where, as a society, we have decided not to punish those who have benefitted least from society’s shared goods.

This radical minimalist approach would require a commensurate investment in community services (proposed in step two). If, for example, we decide that a maximum of twenty women need to be removed from the wider community at any time. Then two small scale detention facilities⁵⁵ (up to ten women each in normalised community-based settings) with low-security and “dynamic security”⁵⁶ measures could be developed. Augmented with the implementation of women’s problem-solving courts, this would gradually filter people away from carceral settings to places of care and support.⁵⁷

Starting to think in these minimalist terms, such approaches to female imprisonment are not a single intervention for women but would also lead to a paradigm shift towards recognising social needs which the prison cannot meet.

Ireland’s two open prisons – Shelton Abbey and Loughan House – are only for men but are geographically isolated. Repurposing the two women’s prisons as two open prisons for men, within a low-security cordon, in Dublin and Limerick respectively, would reduce the overall intensity of prison security levels, permit meaningful sentence progression, and allow prisons to become more reintegrative as people could work closer to their communities prior to release. The closure of female prisons is a proposal which may have public support⁵⁸ or, at least, less opposition. A monolith like the prison system can’t be dismantled or reduced through a head-on approach, rather little cracks must be first exploited and allowed to run the length of its walls.

LIMITS ARE NOT A LIMIT TO CREATIVE RESPONSES

With plans and funding to add 1,600 additional prison beds by 2031, Ireland is going through a period of penal excess where the State is “using the penal system too much.”⁵⁹ A penal minimalist approach, as outlined in this manifesto, is a “public good”⁶⁰ which responds to the presence of penal excess as its conceptual opposite. This manifesto makes some proposals which are modest and well-discussed in policy discourse, and others which are a little more radical and less-considered in Irish penal policy. Together, I propose that they describe a path towards a minimalist use of the prison in Ireland. It is not intended to say everything about every part of the prison system or the experience of every incarcerated person. Instead, it recognises that once you begin a journey the next steps emerge as the path unfolds in front of you. Establishing limits will create the context for society to approach these problems with creative freedom.

Prison policy advocacy, like all policy advocacy, is typically delivered in a positive register. Drawing on human rights frameworks and best practice, the focus is on how to achieve better prison practice, service, and conditions which are dignified. This is important in the day-to-day and to offer civil servants policies and ideas to implement. However, this manifesto outlines a negative policy, setting limits and restrictions on current practice and trajectory, or “negative reforms” which “remove greater or smaller parts on which the system in general is more or less dependent”⁶¹ and challenge the prison’s underlying structures of violence. An
approach shaped by optimistic incrementalism will miss the forest for the trees, as the political and policy drivers of prison expansion will continue unchecked.

Each of the four steps seeks a limit. A limit to excess violence and excess imprisonment. To have a fully independent investigation of deaths in custody and serious complaints is to limit inhumane incarceration and the excesses of misconduct and disregard in the Irish Prison Service and Department of Justice contrary to Article 2 commitments of the “right to life.”⁶² The re-allocation of prison capital budget to community services and development work would limit the expansion of prison in lieu of a just social policy. A legally enforceable maximum cap on prison capacity limits the warehousing of people who have experienced many forms of deprivation and harm. Finally, closing women’s prisons places a limit on the neo-expansionist discourse of prisons as places of care and restoration.

Continuing to instinctively read ‘limits’ and ‘constraints’ as bad things is to entirely miss the point of this manifesto. A prison cap, closure of women’s prisons, independent investigations, and investment in community services is not a limit on imaginative responses to social conflict. Rather it is the opposite.⁶³ Creative, non-penal solutions to social conflict and the building of infrastructures of care are fostered when we know there are limits to the amount of imprisonment we can administer as a society. Over-use of the prison reveals the dearth of our societal vision. By placing prison on a much higher shelf, it should prompt our imagination to consider a more just society with less punishment and harm.

Footnotes

1. Keith Adams and Louise Brangan, ‘How I[Reland] Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Prison’, Working Notes 35, no. 89 (2021): 31; Louise Brangan, ‘Pastoral Penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the Pains of Imprisonment’, Theoretical Criminology 25, no. 1 (2021): 1. ↩︎
2. Radical reductionist responses to the problem of the prison can be found within political, ethical, sociological, philosophical and theological traditions. See David Scott, ed., Abolitionist Voices (Bristol University Press, 2025). For rich examples in the Christian tradition, see Hannah Bowman, Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (Fortress Press, 2026); Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration (Fortress Publishers, 2014); Andrew Millie, Criminology and Public Theology (Bristol University Press, 2021); Kathryn Getek Soltis and Katie Walker Grimes, ‘Order, Reform, and Abolition: Changes in Catholic Theological Imagination on Prisons and Punishment’, Theological Studies 82, no. 1 (2021) ↩︎
3. When the initial tender for a 12-month pilot received no compliant responses, the tender was re-advertised in March 2026 after changes to the technical specifications. See Darragh McDonagh, ‘Plans for Electronic Tagging of Criminal Offenders Delayed after Tender Attracts No Bids’, Crime and Law, The Irish Times, 6 March 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2026/03/06/plans-for-electronic-tagging-of-criminal-offenders-delayed-after-tender-attracts-no-bids/. ↩︎
4. Limiting the usage of prison should not be interpreted as an open invitation to increase the range of non-custodial sanctions as this expansion does not solve the issue of individual characteristics—social class, race, gender, precariousness, disability, previous victimisation, etc.— which often govern who we, as a society, end up punishing ↩︎
5. In its simplest terms, David Hayes describes “penal excess” as an excessive use of the penal system but he also helpfully maps out what this overreliance looks like in practice: an excessive overall size, and a disproportionately uneven shape. In the former, he is describing the interference of liberty and autonomy for members of the polity, while the latter describes the extent to which certain cohorts of society are most regularly subjected to the State’s coercive control. For a finely written exploration, see David Hayes, Confronting Penal Excess: Retribution and the Politics of Penal Minimalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 32 ↩︎
6. David Scott, For Abolition: Essays on Prisons and Socialist Ethics (Waterside Press, 2020), 53. ↩︎
7. Colm Keena, ‘Irish Prison Conditions among the Worst “Anywhere”, Chief Inspector Tells Politicians’, The Irish Times, 13 January 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2026/01/13/irish-prison-conditions-amongst-the-worst-anywhere-chief-inspector-tells-politicians/. ↩︎
8. Keith Adams, ‘Consuming Injustice: Food and Irish Prisons’, Working Notes: Facts and Analysis of Social and Economic Issues (Dublin) 39, no. 99 (2025): 13–20. ↩︎
9. Stanley Cohen, ‘The Critical Discourse on “Social Control”: Notes on the Concept as a Hammer’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 17, no.3 (1989): 347–57. ↩︎
10. A National Preventive Mechanism is a body, or a group of bodies, which monitor at a national level the treatment of and conditions for people deprived of their liberty. For a detailed background to NPMs, see Irish Penal Reform Trust, ‘The Ratification of the Optional Protocol (OP-CAT) to the UN Convention Against Torture (UN CAT) and the Establishment of a National Preventive Mechanism in Ireland’, Discussion Paper, January 2017, https://www.iprt.ie/site/assets/files/6402/iprt_
    discussion_paper_on_npm_proposals_jan2017_docx.pdf ↩︎
11. Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, ‘Commission Proposed as Coordinating National Preventative Mechanism’, Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, 8 November 2022, https://www.ihrec.ie/news-press/commission-proposed-as-coordinating-national-preventative-mechanism-under-inspection-of-places-of-detention-bill. ↩︎
12. The General Scheme of Inspection of Places of Detention Bill proposes expanding the role and remit of the Office of Inspector of Prisons, renaming it as the Inspectorate of Places of Detention, led by a newly established Office of Chief Inspector. Under the proposed legislation, this new office will become the designated NPM for the Justice Sector and will be responsible for the inspection of four places of detention. See Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Draft General Scheme – Inspection of Places of Detention’, June 2022, sect. 4, https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/draft-general-scheme-inspection-of-places-of-detention-bill-june-2022.pdf. ↩︎
13. Ireland signed the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture in October 2007 but full ratification has not been possible due to the failure to set up an independent National Preventive Mechanism. See Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Minister for Justice Publishes General Scheme of the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill’, gov.ie, 24 June 2022, https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-justice-home-affairs-and-migration/press-releases/minister-for-justice-publishes-general-scheme-of-the-inspection-of-places-of-detention-bill/. ↩︎
14. Joint Committee on Justice debate – Tuesday, 18 Oct 2022, ‘General Scheme of the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill 2022: Discussion’, text, Houses of the Oireachtas, 18 October 2022 ↩︎
15. For a full list of current Bills before the Oireachtas, see Houses of the Oireachtas, ‘Dáil Business Daily Schedule’, Houses of the Oireachtas, accessed 28 April 2026, https://dailbusiness.oir.ie/.  As of November 2025, the General Scheme of the Places of Detention Bill was still being drafted by the Department with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. See Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service – Thursday, 27 Nov 2025 – Parliamentary Questions (34th Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 27 November 2025 ↩︎
16. Section 31(4) of the Prisons Act 2007 permits the Minister of Justice to “omit any matter from any report so laid or published” on grounds of prison security, State security, contrary to the public interest, or infringement of the constitutional rights of any person. For the full section, see Government of Ireland, ‘Prisons Act 2007’, Office of the Attorney General, sect. 31(4), https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2007/act/10/section/31/enacted/en/html#sec31. ↩︎
17. There are currently two unpublished investigative reports by the Office of the Inspector of Prisons, in relation to Mountjoy Women’s prison, submitted in February 2022 and July 2022 respectively. Both investigations were conducted under Section 31(2) of the Prisons Act but remain unpublished after four years. See Minister for Justice, ‘Prison Service – Wednesday, 3 Jul 2024 – Parliamentary Questions (33rd Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 3 July 2024. ↩︎
18. Under Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees the rights to life, there is an obligation to provide an effective system for the investigation of deaths in custody. See ‘European Convention on Human Rights’, Council of Europe, 4 November 1950, art. 2, https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/convention_eng.pdf. ↩︎
19. Muiris O’Cearbhaill, ‘Unreasonable Force by Prison Officers and Falsified Records at Cloverhill Prison, Report Finds’, The Journal, 24 July 2025,https://www.thejournal.ie/cloverhill-prison-deaths-unreasonable-force-6771268-Jul2025/; Sean McCarthaigh, ‘Prisoner Found Dead in Cell within Two Days of Returning to Jail after Being on the Run’, Irish
    Independent, 18 November 2021, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/prisoner-found-dead-in-cell-within-two-days-of-returning-to-jail-after-being-on-the-run/41065170.html. ↩︎
20. An Garda Siochana’s investigation relates to alleged or suspected crimes associated with the death and they work on behalf of the Coroner, who then determines the cause of death and can make recommendations. See Office of the Inspector of Prisons, ‘Death in Custody Information Booklet’, Office of the Inspector of Prisons, n.d., 5–6, https://www.oip.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/DIC-Information-Booklet.pdf. ↩︎
21. Office of the Inspector of Prisons, Death in Custody Investigation Report: Mr. J, Cloverhill Prison, 28 September 2020 (Office of the Inspector of Prisons, 2026), 10–11, https://www.oip.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Office-of-the-Inspector-of-Prisons-Death-in-Custody-Report-Mr-J-2020.pdf. ↩︎
22. Following the death of their nephew, Colm Connolly, in the Midlands Prison on 1st April 2026, his family are seeking legal advice to uncover the circumstances of his death. Colm died as he was being moved by prison officers from his shared cell to an observation cell. The family were not informed of Colm’s death by the prison Governor, were unable to formally identify the body, and a post mortem was conducted without their knowledge. With more questions than answers, the family note that “[w]e are Colm’s voice now and we have to do right by him,” and they “want an independent inquiry to investigate what happened to Colm, not prison authorities investigating each other.” For more details see Sarah Slater, ‘Family Seeks Independent Inquiry into Death of Nephew at Midlands Prison’, The Irish Times, 4 May 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2026/05/04/family-seeks-independent-inquiry-into￾death-of-nephew-at-midlands-prison/. ↩︎
23. Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, ‘Commission Proposed as Coordinating National Preventative Mechanism…’. ↩︎
24. Irish Penal Reform Trust, ‘IPRT Welcomes the Publication of the General Scheme of the Ins…’, Irish Penal Reform Trust, 1 June 2022, https://www.iprt.ie/latest-news/iprt-welcomes-the-publication-of-the-inspection-of￾places-of-detention-bill/ ↩︎
25. Irish Penal Reform Trust, ‘IPRT Welcomes the Publication of the General Scheme of the Ins…’; Section 6(2) of the General Scheme permits “[s]uch funds, premises, facilities, services and staff as may be necessary for the proper functioning of the Inspectorate of Places of Detention shall be provided to it by the Minister with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.” For more detail, see Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Draft General Scheme – Inspection of Places of Detention’. ↩︎
26. The former Minister for Justice, Simon Harris T.D. noted that, following consultation with the Office of the Ombudsman, “it was agreed that under the revised complaints system, the role of the Ombudsman will become operational once the new complaints system has been established and has bedded down.” His successor, Helen McEntee T.D. clarified that draft amendments to the statutory instrument (S.I. No. 252/2007) undergirding the prisoner complaints system operated by the Irish Prison Service would “provide a role for the Ombudsman in the Prison Complaints system. See Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service –Wednesday, 15 Feb 2023 – Parliamentary Questions (33rd Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 15 February 2023, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-02-15/138; Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service – Tuesday, 13 Jun 2023 – Parliamentary Questions (33rd Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 13 June 20 ↩︎
27. Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service –Tuesday, 29 Jul 2025 – Parliamentary Questions (34th Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 29 July 2025, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-07-29/2102. ↩︎
28. The original timeline for the introduction of a revised prison complaints system by the Irish Prison Service was the third quarter of 2019. See Irish Penal Reform Trust, Progress in the Penal System (PIPS): Assessing Progress during a Pandemic (Dublin, 2020), 90. ↩︎
29. Category A are complaints alleging assault or use of excessive force against a prisoner, or ill-treatment, racial abuse, discrimination, intimidation, threats or any other conduct against a prisoner of a nature and gravity likely to bring discredit on the Irish Prison Service. Category B are complaints of a serious nature, but not falling within any other category of complaint. Examples of Category B complaints could include verbal abuse of prisoners by staff, inappropriate searches or any other conduct against a prisoner of a nature likely to bring discredit to the Irish Prison Service. The latter are investigated by a Chief Officer. ↩︎
30. In a 2022 Joint Committee on Justice hearing, Dr Ciara O’Connell, Senior Inspector with the Office of the Inspector of Prisons called for a prisons ombudsman to consider complaints. She further noted that, even after an external investigator reaches a determination, the governor still has the power to overturn the decision. In addition, the Inspector of Prisons, Mark Kelly, advised that “[p]rocessing complaints and inspection are two completely different functions, and it is not a good idea to comingle them.” See Joint Committee on Justice debate – Tuesday, 18 Oct 2022, ‘General Scheme of the Inspection of Places of Detention Bill 2022: Discussion’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 18 October 2022. ↩︎
31. This was a very helpful distinction made by Prof. Sarah Armstrong, University of Glasgow, during a session at the 2026 Annual Conference of the British/Irish section of the European Group held in University College Cork. ↩︎
32. Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Record €6.17 Billion for Justice Sector in Budget 2026’, gov.ie, 9 October 2025, https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-justice-home-affairs-and-migration/news/record-6-17-billion-for-justice-sector-in-budget-2026/. ↩︎
33. Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service –Tuesday, 14 Apr 2026 – Parliamentary Questions (34th Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 14 April 2026, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-04-14/2081. ↩︎
34. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (Russell & Russell, 1939). ↩︎
35. Mental Health Reform, Pay the Bill: Pre-Budget Submission 2026 (Mental Health Reform, 2025), https://mentalhealthreform.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/PBS-2026-report.pdf ↩︎
36. Orla Ryan, ‘The Changing Face of Addiction: “Some People Were First Using Drugs in Their 50s and 60s”’, The Irish Times, 2 March 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2026/03/02/the-changing-face-of-addiction-some-people-were-first-using-drugs-in-their-50s-and-60s/. ↩︎
37. Laoise Neylon, ‘Dublin’s Housing First Programme Is on Pause, Raising Questions about Competitive Tendering for Social Care Services’, Dublin InQuirer, 18 July 2025, https://www.dublininquirer.com/dublins-housing-first-programme-is-on-pause-raising-questions-about-competitive-tendering-for-social-care-services/. ↩︎
38. Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, ‘Prison Service – Thursday, 22 Jan 2026 – Parliamentary Questions (34th Dáil)’, Houses of the Oireachtas, 22 January 2026, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2026-01-22/454?highlight%5B0%5D=prisons ↩︎
39. Cormac O’Keeffe, ‘Prisoner Numbers on Course to Reach “unimaginable” Level’, Irish Examiner, 5 January 2026, https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41770376.html ↩︎
40. Irish Prison Service, ‘Census Prison Population July 2025 – Cell Occupancy– In-Cell Sanitation’, Irish Prison Service, July 2025, https://www.irishprisons.ie/wp-content/uploads/documents_pdf/JULY-2025-In-Cell.pdf. ↩︎
41. In July 2025, the latest available census of the Irish prison population, 3,634 people had to use a toilet in the presence of others, see Irish Prison Service, ‘Census Prison Population July 2025 – Cell Occupancy – In-Cell Sanitation.’ In addition, many prisoners have to eat meals in crowded cells adjacent to unscreened toilets, see Adams, ‘Consuming Injustice: Food and Irish Prisons’ ↩︎
42. Currently, the Prison Rules allow for a standard remission of a quarter of the sentence, subject to compliance with certain criteria. There is also an enhanced remission of a third for prisoners who demonstrate engagement in authorised structured behaviour, but it is subject to Executive decision-making, involving sign-off by the Minister for Justice, and is infrequently granted. For more details, see ‘Temp Release & Remission’, Irish Legal Blog, accessed 29 April 2026, https://legalblog.ie/temp-release-remission/. ↩︎
43. In 2025, in response to crowded prisons, new changes to criminal justice legislation in England and Wales would allow for automatic release after serving 40% of a prison sentence. See ‘New Change to Some Offenders’ Automatic Release Dates’, GOV.UK, 11 September 2024, https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-change-to-some-offenders-automatic-release￾dates. ↩︎
44. Oberstown Children Detention Campus has a maximum capacity of 46 children (40 boys and 6 girls) which is set by the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality by way of a certificate made under the Children Act 2001. See Minister for Children, Disability and Equality, ‘Detention Centres – Tuesday, 1 Jul 2025 – Parliamentary Questions (34th Dáil)’,Houses of the Oireachtas, 1 July 2025, Ireland. ↩︎
45. For examples of where the judge had to consider alternative options, see Tom Tuite, ‘Judge Forced to Release Alleged Teen Joyrider as Oberstown Detention Centre Was Full’, Irish Independent, 15 May 2023, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/judge-forced-to-release-alleged￾teen-joyrider-as-oberstown-detention-centre-was-full/a1503782977.
    html; ‘Judge Forced to Grant Bail to Teen as Oberstown Full’, RTE, 12 February 2018, https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2018/0212/940172-teenager-bail-oberstown/ ↩︎
46. United Nations, Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Mandela Rules) (United Nations, 2015). ↩︎
47. Gabija Gatavectaite et al., ‘Almost All Women in Irish Prisons Are There for Committing Petty Crime’, TheJournal.ie, 23 April 2019. ↩︎
48. In the three months from March 2020 to June 2020, the monthly average for the prison population decreased from 4,062 to just 3,707 incarcerated people and hovered around this mark for ten months. See Keith Adams, ‘Covid-19 and the Decarceral Instinct’, Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 2 December 2021, https://www.jcfj.ie/2021/12/02/covid-19-and-the-decarceral-instinct/. ↩︎
49. Liz Dunphy, ‘“It’s a Great Move Forward for Society”: Limerick Prison Opens New Luxury Women’s Wing’, Irish Examiner, 18 October 2023, https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41250700.html. ↩︎
50. Bree Carlton and Emma K. Russell, ‘The Weaponisation of “Trauma￾Informed” Discourse in Prison Policy: An Abolition Feminist Critique’, Incarceration 4 (2023): 1–18. ↩︎
51. Miriam Ticktin, ‘Thinking beyond Humanitarian Borders’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2016): 255–71. ↩︎
52. Gatavectaite et al., ‘Almost All Women in Irish Prisons Are There for Committing Petty Crime’ ↩︎
53. For example, clients who utilised the incarceration and forced labour of the women and girls at the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry included semi-state companies, third-level institutions, private schools, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, shops, elite sports clubs, and law and accountancy firms. Though it is questionable how historic this relationship is, considering the closure of the last Laundry on Sean McDermott Street was only in 1996. See Mark Coen et al., eds, A Dublin Magdalene Laundry: Donnybrook and Church-State Power in Ireland (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) ↩︎
54. Sophie Howes, Women Who Kill: How the State Criminalises Women We Might Be Burying (Centre for Women’s Justice, 2021) ↩︎
55. Small-scale detention is a concept developed in Belgium by De Huizen (the houses) where large prisons are eventually replaced by detention houses and transition houses which meet the criteria of being small-scale, differentiated, and anchored in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, due to political decisions in sentence execution, this concept has led to additional places of detention rather than replacing places in large-scale prisons. However, the concept of small-scale detention has transformative potential in female imprisonment if the medium-security closed prisons are closed at the same time as the small-scale detention is developed, so capacity for female prisoners is radically reduced and not augmenting existing prisons. See ‘Het Detentiehuis: Innovatief Concept Met Een Mensgerichte Aanpak Voor Een Herstelgerichte Strafuitvoering’, De Huizen, accessed 29 April 2026, https://www.dehuizen.be/ons-concept/het-detentiehui ↩︎
56. The concept of dynamic security, as opposed to static security, is based on an “alert group of staff who interact with, and who know, their prisoners; staff developing positive staff-prisoner relationships; staff who have an awareness of what is going on in the prison; fair treatment and a sense of ‘wellbeing’ among prisoners; and staff who make sure that prisoners are kept busy doing constructive and purposeful activities that contribute to their future reintegration into society.” See ‘Handbook on Dynamic Security and Prison Intelligence’, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2015, 29. ↩︎
57. Ruth Armstrong and Shona Minson, ‘Justice Changes Her Face’: What Women’s Problem-Solving Courts Can Teach Us About Taking a Community Based Whole Systems Approach to Improving Criminal Justice Outcomes. (Justice Matters/Clinks, 2025), https://www.weavers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Final-Submitted-Clinks-Report-on-WPSC-Research-Review-1.pdf; Shona Minson, ‘The Disruption of Women’s Imprisonment: Negative Consequences and Non-Carceral Alternatives’, Studies 113, no.450 (2024): 155–67.2025 ↩︎
58. In a public survey, conducted by RED C and commissioned by the Irish Penal Reform Trust, prior to the 2024 General Election, two-thirds of those surveyed agreed that “expanding prison capacity is not the solution to reducing crime, rather, we should focus on preventing crime and addressing its root causes.” Public Attitudes Polling on Prison and Criminal Justice (Irish Penal Reform Trust, 2024), https://www.iprt.ie/site/assets/files/7530/iprt_prison_and_criminal_justice_public_opinion
    polling_-_13-11-24.pdf. ↩︎
59. Hayes, Confronting Penal Excess, 13.. ↩︎
60. Hayes, Confronting Penal Excess, 15–16 ↩︎
61. Thomas Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition Revisited (Routledge, 2015), 223. ↩︎
62. ‘European Convention on Human Rights’, art. 2 ↩︎
63. In an interview with the New Internationalist, Nils Christie firmly underlined that any prison policy is a choice, not an inevitable path as he wondered “Then I ask myself: when is enough enough? How many people can you execute? How large a prison population can you have before you change the kind of country you live in? It is the same kind of question as to whether you want a national theatre or libraries. What kind of country would it be without them?” For full interview, see ‘Crime and Civilization’, The New Internationalist, 5 August 1996, https://newint.org/features/1996/08/05/crime ↩︎