Crowded prisons are unsafe. According to the Council of Europe, when a country’s prison population exceeds 90 per cent of available capacity, this becomes a high-risk situation and urgent remedial action is required. The Irish Prison Service defines 95 per cent as a safe operating limit.
In January 2022, the prison population stood at 85 per cent of capacity, comfortably below either threshold.
Today it stands at 122 per cent.
Behind those statistics are real people whose lives are being diminished. Last month a man with acute mental illness in Cloverhill was stabbed in the eye with a pen. He lost the eye as a result. The suspect for the attack was a man with psychiatric issues. The two men had been locked in the same cell because of overcrowding.
The victim was a pensioner with no prior criminal history who was on remand for burglary. It is profoundly upsetting to imagine how it must have felt for an innocent man in his 70s to have his eye punctured beyond repair in a squalid cell in a grossly overcrowded prison. The victim must now learn to navigate his way through what remains of his life half blind as well as struggling with mental illness.
