This year’s paper, “For we know not what we do. Reflections on punishment, community and forgiveness,” will be delivered by Prof. Dr. Pieter De Witte, KU Leuven on Tuesday, 21st April. It promises to be a stimulating event as we consider the role of punishment and the place of prison in society. This is particularly… Read more »

Though this ordeal, the State has inflicted immeasurable harm and suffering on Patrick Sibanyoni. There is the immediacy and acuity of the pain from being in prison with a psychiatric illness. There is the potential for greater unnecessary disability over his life as his condition worsened without treatment.

Those caught in this situation are often too unwell to stand trial, condemned to spend an indeterminate time in an overcrowded prison. Prisons, which have a deleterious effect on those with stable mental health, exacerbate the rapid fraying of a person’s mind. It is not too much to draw an equivalence to torture.

If a more populist right Government, than the incumbent coalition, were to emerge in Ireland, then they have an arsenal of tools to further suppress peaceful democratic protest and respond punitively to protestors.

On 13th March 2025, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice welcomed Dr Geertjan Zuijdwegt—criminologist and theologian at KU Leuven—for an expert seminar on small-scale detention and the Belgian experience of implementing this modality of punishment.

Forced to take an indirect route to work or a night out because of “no-go” streets. Hurriedly crossing the road due to serial law-breaking and aggressive behaviour. Speeding up on your bicycle as a “single male” aggressively follows. Children unable to go to school on their own—even the shortest distance—without needing to be delivered to the school gate in the parental car.

“What is the moral basis for punishing someone, perhaps hard, in order to prevent entirely different people from committing equivalent acts, when those we punish to a large extent are poor and highly stigmatised people in need of assistance rather than punishment?”

A new prison at Thornton Hall was a bad idea in 2005, and it still remains so.

The question of how people ended up with “multiple and complex needs” is avoided to focus on regulation, form- filling and box-ticking; all wrapped in the language of concern.

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.