Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan said that he wants to addressing prison overcrowding.
MINISTER FOR JUSTICE Jim O’Callaghan intends to enact legislation to increase the use of community sanctions for non-violent offenders so that they are not ‘clogging up’ Ireland’s prisons.
In an interview on Virgin Media Television’s The Tonight Show, O’Callaghan said that he wants to addressing prison overcrowding.
“It is extremely important that we have extra prison spaces. At present, we have about 5,000 people in prison, which is about 111% capacity. We need more spaces,” the minister said.
“I was out in Cloverhill Prison a number of weeks ago. There’s overcrowding there; there’s overcrowding in many of our prisons,” he said.
“What I can’t do is simply say we’re not going to put people in prison because of the overcrowding. If people are convicted of very serious crimes, whether they be knife crimes or murder or sex crimes or rape, there has to be a term of imprisonment for them, and we need to have the spaces there to be providing them with that term.
