Inside an Irish prison. The number of people sleeping on mattresses on the floor breached 350 earlier this week. POA POA

SENIOR SOURCES WITHIN the Irish Prison Service have said severe overcrowding has increased the risk of rioting within Dublin prisons.

It is the working belief of the Irish Prison Service that overcrowding levels are so high that a violent incident is extremely likely to take place within one of the densely populated facilities in Dublin, one senior prison service source said.

Overcrowding levels in Irish prisons have not been as high since 2009, when there were more than 13,500 people in custody. 

Towards the end of that year, at the height of an overcrowding crisis, between 15 and 20 prisoners armed with wood and metal bars became involved in an altercation with others in Mountjoy prison. A number people were later convicted for the riot.

The source pointed to the 2009 incident as evidence that extreme levels of overcrowding increase the risk of violence, adding that current risk level is high as it has been in decades.

Nationwide overcrowding in prisons is a major cause for concern among staff and officers according to the Irish Prison Officers’ Association (POA), which has called for action to resolve the overcrowding crisis as soon as possible.

POA President Tony Power said many prison officers believe that with hot weather expected in the city this summer and cramped conditions within Irish prisons, tensions inside between people in custody will begin to rise.

“The problem is that we’ve nowhere to put people,” Power told The Journal at the POA conference in Galway this week.

“If there is a riot in Mountjoy and we’ve to move 20 people to Midlands Prison, it means we have to move 20 people out of the Midlands [to make room]. That can’t work.”

A spokesperson for the Irish Prison Service said it does not comment on operational or security matters. 

Officers working in over-crowded prisons have described the situation as a “shit show”.

The POA this week expressed concern over the level of contraband coming into prisons, with growing worry among officers that a firearm might be smuggled in.

There is a total of 4,666 beds in the Irish prison system, with about 300 beds ideally kept free to ensure safe capacity can be maintained.

There are now between 900 and 1,100 more prisoners than beds and fewer spaces are kept free. The service this week began keeping track of the number of people sleeping on mattresses on the floor, with numbers breaching 350 on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters this week, director general of the Irish Prison Service Caron McCaffrey said the service currently has no plans to build new prisons and that it is “far quicker and cheaper” to expand existing prisons.

“We have lots of plans in relation to additional spaces. Progress is being made on existing projects and we are building on existing prison sites, but the difficulty is the public spending appraisal process takes two years,” she said.

Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan pledged to find ways to accelerate the delivery of more prison spaces when addressing the union’s annual conference this week.

But the senior source said the service knows that “building out of” the current crisis is not an option, given the timescale involved in capital projects.

Throughout the service there is an increasing level of frustration over what has been described as “neglect” by successive ministers to deal with overcrowding.

A number of people working in the prison service also highlighted how a 2013 report by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Penal Reform, which recommended the state take a decarceration strategy to prisons and reduce reliance on custodial sentences, has not been implemented.