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FIGURES RELEASED TODAY reveal just over 40 per cent of people re-offend within the three year period of being placed under Probation Service supervision.
The figures for 2008, published by the CSO today, show 3,761 individual cases were placed on either probation orders or community service orders. Overall rates fell from the previous year when almost 50 per cent of those under supervision re-offended.
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Some 40.3 per cent who re-offended did so within the first 12 months while an additional 31.7 per cet did so within 18 to 24 months.
Re-offending was higher among males, at 42.1 per cent, than females, at 34 per cent. It also decreased with age with 58.1 per cent of those re-offending aged less than 18 years.
Levels were higher for those under probation orders than for community service orders.
The majority of the ‘re-offences’ were in the area of public order while 17 per cent related to theft and related offences and almost 10 per cent were controlled drugs offences.
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Irish justice is a joke. There’s no fear of consequence in Ireland.
You offend and get free legal aid and then probation and people who’ve been victims are left to fend for themselves while criminals get all their “entitlements”.
If there was proper sentences and punishment criminals would think twice about what they’re doing. At the moment they can do whatever they want and flaunt it.
It doesn’t say what kind of crimes. So a % could be people jailed for non payment of fines as a result of being broke, jailed again for other financial problems down the line.
I have some humble suggestions for our broken justice system:
1. Decriminalize drug USE and focus all the resources on dealers to target adolescents and kids
2. Decriminalize all crimes where there is not a clear victim, stop sending people to prison for refusing to subscribe to RTE
2. Move our age of consent law from 17 to 16 and allow for a defense of genuine error while keeping a zone of absolute protection up to say 13-14.
3. Abolish parole, probation and suspended sentences. Either punish people or don’t
4. Have alternative punishments for non violent crimes like proportional fines and house arrest through tagging, and move as many crimes as possible to a restorative justice model (making them face their victims and make restutiion studys show has the biggest effect on repeat offending) to free up space in prisons.
5. End this nonsense of ”the youth has 47 previous convictions”, have 3 strikes and you get life for all violent crimes and certain other crimes, between those exhaust all attempts at rehabilitation. If someones coming into court for a 4th violent offence it ought to be clear they have formed a pattern of behavior that’s not likely to change.
Dunno what the rest of you think but I think that would be a vast improvement.
I still think your example in point five warrants a bullet but that’s never going to happen. We do need to come up with a lower cost alternative to life in prison. Even if you limit three strikes to certain offences it will result in more prisoners. It just costs so much to house them.
Agreed. Obviously not like the States as that clearly doesn’t work. How about looking at what the people do? How about mandatory classes to try and retrain and rehabilitate these people. Non attendance resulting in jail time. Making them show up at a Garda station once or twice a week is useless if they still swing in the same crowds. Should be done after release from prison too. Forced relocation would be another solution. Remove them from the influences around them.
It does not work in the US because in states like california smoking pot can get you a strike, which is utter lunacy. If we restricted the model to violent crimes and some other high crimes it would target the worst re-offenders.
A big gap in the system now is when people leave prison they go back to the same friends and clique that got them into trouble in the first place, we need to think of something to break that cycle.
We have lots of uninhabited islands around Ireland right? So rather than plush prisons with all the mod cons why not build some sheds on the islands, give them a diet of bread and water. Lets see how many reoffend then!
according to this report, the likelyhood of re- offending “decreeces with age with 58.1 % of those re-offending under 18 yrs of age” the solution is simple then, dont let them out untill there at least 25!
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