nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Child Item

Why don't our prisoners work?

A Battered Mars Bar

What are they doing all day? Just lounging around playing ps4?

Only punishment suitable for them would be to put them to work in prison. As most of them haven't done a days work in their lives it would put a bit of discipline in them and they will learn the merits of working hard.

And I don't mean cotton wool jobs like laundry and kitchen work. I mean making stuff that can be sold so the state profits or digging. There is always stuff to be dug.

Just think it's a joke that they're allowed lay about all day like lazy sods in prison.

Find more posts tagged with

Quick Links

Comments

Turtyturd

These threads never fail to highlight just how little people know of what actually happens in prison.

Mark25

Really Interested wrote: »

Most prisoners look at work in the prison as a good thing the highest job is kitchen work, but prisoners also do the laundry, cleaning and in some prisons farm work.

With out prison labour it would not be possible to feed each one for the budget of I believe €1.50 a day.

100% right about the kitchen work

Gravelly

Samuel T. Cogley wrote: »

Gravelly wrote: »

You didn't, the sensitive lawyer above you did.

IANAL.

The chances of me being able to survive the attrician at the bar are very slim indeed, if I ever even qualify. I like being able to afford food.

My mistake, your sensitivity towards the profession made me assume you were one. I really don't think it's as badly paid as you seem to think it is, I know quite a few and not a single one of them is anything other than pretty well off.

Terrontress

Mark25 wrote: »

Some do lay around all the time but most don't. There is work if you can get a job and there are courses you can do.

But when people say make prisoners work - some do get to go outside to work mainly from open prisons like Shelton Abbey and from the Training Unit in Mountjoy - and then the papers have a story about people been out of prison and working people complain that they shouldn't be out of prison and working and should be kept locked up.

Even if everybody wanted to work there aren't enough jobs for everyone and you have to be in for a while to get a job. Plenty of prisoners are wing cleaners but the best jobs are in the gardens or in the kitchens which I did. But it took a while to get that job.

You only get a little bit more on your daily allowance if you are working so people don't do it for the money. I'd much prefer to be doing something useful in the kitchens instead of just spending my time in my cell smoking and watching TV or hanging about on the landings. I did a few courses as well to fil up the time as much as I could.

I had my problems going into prison but nothing like some of the others in there. I was working as a waiter before prison so not everybody there hasn't worked a day in their life like you said. I sometimes did 50 hours a week in my job.

There are workshops where people make things and learn skills but I didn't do that. What do you mean by digging? Even if they did do that people would be saying that it would be "dangerous" to have prisoners out working doing it.

You do know that up until recently there was still slopping out in some prisons here? They were refurbishing Mountjoy when I was there to do away with that.

Because of all the trouble going on in prisons there are plenty of prisoners in solitary confinement - locked in their cells 23 hours a day pretty much.

Yeah right. Just keep on dreaming.

Some people seem to believe everything they see in the papers and think that prisons are a holiday camp but they are nothing like that. I've been in Mountjoy, the Training Unit and Wheatfield so know what I am talking about. Yeah you have a TV in your cell but they deduct for the cost of that from your allowance. If they didn't have TVs in the cell there would be more trouble and people kicking off from being bored out of their minds. There is enough trouble in prison without making it worse. Even if you stay away from all that you can say the wrong thing to the wrong person and get into bother.

Most people in prison have other problems that is part of the reason why they are there and I think they could do more to deal with problems while you are there and not drinking/on drugs as much.

But when you get out nobody wants to give you a chance if they hear you've been in prison especially with jobs and people fall out with their missus and families. I was lucky that when I got out I could go home to my family and also signed up to go to college after a few months. I am back working part time too .

Good on you Mark. I'm never sure what the point of prison is. To separate people from the general population so they can't do harm? To exclude people from real life to punish them? Or to take them away to rehabilitate them. I think each person imprisoned requires different mixes of the above, but I could never conceivably come up with a suitable punishment for the likes of Ian Huntley or Anders Brevik, and many other home grown horrors. Death seems too easy an escape and life too lenient.

Anyway, it seems that you have been rehabilitated and that's great. Hopefully as long as you're straight, you'll have the respect of those around you.

KwackerJack

livedadream wrote: »

because slavery doesn't exist in Ireland...

Somebody would want to tell the majority of employers that.....never mind the amount of tax we pay to feed the prisoners!!

Really Interested

Gravelly wrote: »

My mistake, your sensitivity towards the profession made me assume you were one. I really don't think it's as badly paid as you seem to think it is, I know quite a few and not a single one of them is anything other than pretty well off.

Now I know you are not meeting all of them. From personal knowledge 50% of barrister earn less than 50k a year at a guess 25% earn less than 20k a year. I know many a barrister who for first 5-10 years had to live with mammy and daddy as they could not pay rent.

Really Interested

KwackerJack wrote: »

Somebody would want to tell the majority of employers that.....never mind the amount of tax we pay to feed the prisoners!!

The huge part of the prison budget is from memory over 70% is wages for staff. Food budget is 1.50 a day per prisoner or about 7000 a day to feed them all.

[Deleted User]

Prisoners are locked up in their cells for 18 hours per day. The longest period they are not locked in is about 2 hours. They do work during this time. Either work or go to the prison school.
I'm so most would prefer to be unlocked for longer and work longer but we're would need to employ a lot more prison officers for this to happen

wakka12

Gravelly wrote: »

If prisoners were put to work doing "real" jobs, then private companies could complain (rightly) about unfair competition, and you would also have the above mentioned problem of "for profit" prisons, and all the potential problems that could bring. In order to get around both of these problems, you could make prisoners do "makework jobs" - such as digging trenches in the prison yard, which are then filled in and dug again, building brick walls using lime mortar which are then knocked down to be rebuilt, stripping car engines and rebuilding them etc.

Prisoners could be given very basic accommodation and food (no TV or playstation, no dessert, basic, no-frills cell) and they could earn these things through their work, and lose them if they refused to work or did their work badly.

The advantages to these types of jobs would be:

Prisoners would learn the discipline of real-world jobs - getting up at the same time every day, working a full 8 hours, taking orders etc.
They would learn real, usable skills - in the cases above, labouring, bricklaying, mechanical skills etc. which could be used when they are released
They would have less time on their hands, so less fighting, drug use, etc.
It would keep them fit and healthy, physically and mentally

A prisoner who did such work would have to be more prepared for life in the outside society than one who has sat in a cell, taking drugs and playing video games for the duration of their sentence.

The problem of course, is that the do-gooder brigade would consider it a human rights violation akin to the nazi concentration camps to make prisoners work, so it will never happen unfortunately. Far better to let them stew and plan their further criminal enterprises when they get out.

What about something like cleaning up rivers and beaches and parks of rubbish or other things beneficial to the community rather than making commodities that a prison can sell for profit

Beyondgone

Mark25 wrote: »

Yeah right. Just keep on dreaming.

I may not have been entirely serious. Or even vaguely serious.

Mark25

wakka12 wrote: »

What about something like cleaning up rivers and beaches and parks of rubbish or other things beneficial to the community rather than making commodities that a prison can sell for profit

That's what people on community service do.

I would have loved to be able to do something like that and get out of prison for a day but I think people would be against allowing prisoners out of prison to do that

Gbear

Having a gander at the official stats here, there were about 3200 people in prison in 2014.
It's probably gone up, but it's presumably still in the same ballpark.

Of those, by my reckoning, about 1500 are there for violent offences.
I saw another statistic floating around that it costs about €70k a year to keep someone in prison on average.
I'm not 100% certain how accurate that is, and what the variations are depending on the seriousness of the offence that caused the person to be imprisoned, but if we take it at face value, that's over €100m a year spent on imprisoning non-violent criminals.

Other than vengeance what benefit do we get from imprisoning people for fraud, theft or other non-violent crimes?

At worst, they'll steal more things, which will have a monetary value. Well so does imprisoning them.
Whether you're giving money to a thief or a government, it amounts to the same thing. You're out of pocket.

At best, they'll either behave themselves on their own after being caught or at least they will be able to be monitored (probation, ankle bracelets) and either prevented from committing more crime or caught fairly easily if they do.

So, with that being said, why don't we take all that money and invest it?

You can say people who commit crimes don't deserve it, but is it worth making society worse to make that point? Cutting our noses off to spite our faces? I'm sure we could get a lot more mileage out of education, monitoring and the like with the 70k a year than locking people in a box.

I think there's an awful lot to be said for drastically increasing the severity of punishments for crimes that merit it and most would be in favour, at least for violent crimes. We don't currently have the room in our prisons or the resources.
Again, I think we'd get more value in diverting some of that 70k a year away from the non-violent to support the kind of sentencing that keeps seriously dangerous people out of society permanently.

The world is starting to come around to a less-moronic approach to drugs. How about spending the money imprisoning people for drug-offences on healtcare treatments instead?

As far as employment goes, well it'd be easier to work out the economics of getting employment for criminals if you're not using it as a means to pay off their imprisonment.
Again, it'd probably be cheaper to get them career councelling or diverting them into various forms of education with the aim of getting them back into the workforce rather than first imprisoning them and getting them to make license plates to make it worth the hassle.

Looking at employment itself, and putting the general issue of the value of imprisoning all criminals to one side, there are forms of work that are worth doing and valuable to society, but maybe not valuable enough to warrant paying somone to do.
I'm sure there's enough litter to be collected, trees to be planted, bodies of water that need cleaning to be worth taking volunteers from the prison population in exchange for reducing their debt to society.
Busy work is no good and taking jobs off the rest of the population isn't much use either, but there's always work for strong backs.

Really Interested

wakka12 wrote: »

What about something like cleaning up rivers and beaches and parks of rubbish or other things beneficial to the community rather than making commodities that a prison can sell for profit

How much will the extra prison guards cost for the security?

pilly

Alcoheda wrote:

Do you really want a prison for profit system like they have in the states?

I don't see why not? They get REAL life sentences over there.

pilly

Irish Praetorian wrote:

Also the three strikes rule does seem quite absurd for obvious reasons - I could get on board with a '30 strikes and your out' rule quite easily though.

Why is the 3 strikes rule absurd?

wakka12

Really Interested wrote: »

How much will the extra prison guards cost for the security?

Probably not as much as you think if you bring them in small groups to wide open spaces where you can easily watch over people. And the guards would need to be armed obviously

Samuel T. Cogley

Gravelly wrote: »

My mistake, your sensitivity towards the profession made me assume you were one. I really don't think it's as badly paid as you seem to think it is, I know quite a few and not a single one of them is anything other than pretty well off.

I know a small number of JC on the criminal side. Let's put cards on the table here, they ham it up somewhat. However they are the once that manage to keep going, most (around 50%) don't. A good day for a friend of mine is €250 a day, a good day for another friend of mine is €800 a day. The former a barrister the latter a good sparky.

Once they get in a few years, again these are the ones that survive, the money is livable, but I don't know a single one that isn't, or didn't, work extra jobs.

Yes an SC running a murder or a rape case is going to be making a very good wage indeed, there isn't a huge amount of scope to change that not without the freakanomics you mentioned before.

Gravelly

Samuel T. Cogley wrote: »

Gravelly wrote: »

My mistake, your sensitivity towards the profession made me assume you were one. I really don't think it's as badly paid as you seem to think it is, I know quite a few and not a single one of them is anything other than pretty well off.

I know a small number of JC on the criminal side. Let's put cards on the table here, they ham it up somewhat. However they are the once that manage to keep going, most (around 50%) don't. A good day for a friend of mine is €250 a day, a good day for another friend of mine is €800 a day. The former a barrister the latter a good sparky.

Once they get in a few years, again these are the ones that survive, the money is livable, but I don't know a single one that isn't, or didn't, work extra jobs.

Yes an SC running a murder or a rape case is going to be making a very good wage indeed, there isn't a huge amount of scope to change that not without the freakanomics you mentioned before.

If you really do know a sparky that's charging €800 a day you are being ridden bareback. You can get a couple of sparkies and a few apprentices for that money.

Samuel T. Cogley

pilly wrote: »

Why is the 3 strikes rule absurd?

Because all we'd do is lock up heroin addicts at a huge premium. You'd be better off just giving them heroin and a grotty council flat. Hugely cheaper.

80% of domestic Dublin burglaries are heroin addicts - I concede that figure is from a 2005 book and I forget the year to which it referred. I shudder to think the amount of shop lifting incidents, street robberies etc. they're also responsible for.

The deterrent factor is non-existent for these folk. On the other hand to answer the point (from another poster) on why white collar crime is punished so severely, suggest to most people in a position to commit fruad to the tune of hundreds of grand even go an live in Finglas they'd **** themselves, what do you think the affect of 6 years in mount joy does to the bowels?

I'm not all bleedin' hearts and rainbows. I strongly believe that we have got it very wrong in sentencing for violent and sexual offenders, although the latter is extremely emotive and very poorly understood by many.

I strongly believe that you start off on bread and water (not quite) and work your way up. I completely agree that certain jobs could be done by prisoners and should be - certain state requirements (uniforms is a great example), graffiti removal, road works fcuk it - sorry lads it's chain gangs for you. But this has to be balanced with rehabilitation, study and post release support.

What we have very right indeed in this country is a parity of arms at court level. Yes legal aid should be looked at of course - but what I'd never like to see is a 'public defender' type situation vs. the resources of the state. The hardened criminal has the money for a good lawyer. The dickhead that's got into some petty crime over the years does not.

pilly

Samuel T. Cogley wrote:

Once they get in a few years, again these are the ones that survive, the money is livable, but I don't know a single one that isn't, or didn't, work extra jobs.

This argument comes up again and again. The long and short of it is the ones who last the course usually do so because they've a very rich mammy and daddy.

They then go on to become very rich themselves. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. It's not a vocation. It's a career.

Samuel T. Cogley

Gravelly wrote: »

If you really do know a sparky that's charging €800 a day you are being ridden bareback. You can get a couple of sparkies and a few apprentices for that money.

Whatever - the point remains that Junior barristers (and by that I mean early in their careers) are not making, in some cases, any money at all. It's pretty easy for a properly insured sparky, who is paying the proper tax, to be charging €800 for a large involved job.

pilly

Samuel T. Cogley wrote:

Because all we'd do is lock up heroin addicts at a huge premium. You'd be better off just giving them heroin and a grotty council flat. Hugely cheaper.

Samuel T. Cogley wrote:

80% of domestic Dublin burglaries are heroin addicts - I concede that figure is from a 2005 book and I forget the year to which it referred. I shudder to think the amount of shop lifting incidents, street robberies etc. they're also responsible for.

These 2 comments completely contradict each other.

Costs less to put them in a flat but they're responsible for 80% of burglaries? Is there no cost to these burglaries?

Gravelly

Samuel T. Cogley wrote: »

Gravelly wrote: »

If you really do know a sparky that's charging €800 a day you are being ridden bareback. You can get a couple of sparkies and a few apprentices for that money.

Whatever - the point remains that Junior barristers (and by that I mean early in their careers) are not making, in some cases, any money at all. It's pretty easy for a properly insured sparky, who is paying the proper tax, to be charging €800 for a large involved job.

Conflating a charge for several people and their associated equipment with the charge for a single person doesn't director anything for your point. I'd like to see real statistics for barrister pay. Not doubting your sincerity, but based on what you think sparkies earn, I'd like more than your gut feeling for what barristers earn.

eeguy

pilly wrote: »

These 2 comments completely contradict each other.

Costs less to put them in a flat but they're responsible for 80% of burglaries? Is there no cost to these burglaries?

The point is that 3 strikes rules just fill prisons with petty criminals.

My own view is that prisons should be run like army training, without the weapons.

Physical fitness, proper routines and constant work they can take pride in.
There should be no lounging around, no idle time. Teach them to value discipline and reward hard work.

Samuel T. Cogley

pilly wrote: »

This argument comes up again and again. The long and short of it is the ones who last the course usually do so because they've a very rich mammy and daddy.

Usually middle class if they start at a younger age. Many come to it later I know of at least two cabbies that went some way in to the profession. Never really found out how far one went. A very talented guy was (and still is I think) a nurse - not sure if he'll ever practice.

pilly wrote: »

They then go on to become very rich themselves. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. It's not a vocation. It's a career.

Not really, one JC I'm aware of who would be considered fairly near the top of the pile lives in SCD in a nice house, very comfortable life. I'd say he earns a wee bit more than a senior consultant but without the job security or pension - other than the one he, no doubt, pays for himself completely.

Some make an absolute fortune, but I doubt they're primarily on the criminal side.

There is absolutely no doubt it's one of the few careers out there that is still a vocation, otherwise you'd never get started.

Samuel T. Cogley

Gravelly wrote: »

Conflating a charge for several people and their associated equipment with the charge for a single person doesn't director anything for your point. I'd like to see real statistics for barrister pay. Not doubting your sincerity, but based on what you think sparkies earn, I'd like more than your gut feeling for what barristers earn.

It's not several people. It's a sparky's labour, insurance and VAT. Compared to a barrister getting DC level legal aid payments, his/her Library fee and associated costs.

It's different to a sparky doing a cash in hand, as turn off the fuse box I'm sure it'll be grand job, but then barristers can't work cash in hand.

pilly wrote: »

These 2 comments completely contradict each other.

Costs less to put them in a flat but they're responsible for 80% of burglaries? Is there no cost to these burglaries?

There's absolutely no contradiction there at all. If you remove the cost of heroin to the user, they've no need to commit crime. The cost of Dole+heroin+grotty flat is cheaper than the €76K a year it costs to lock them up, plus the massive cost of the burglaries they do before being caught and locked back up again.

You can treat drug addiction either inside or outside of prison, but you have to treat it. You're not gonna sweat it out of people.

LENNY86

Absolute bolloxology people claiming 3 strike rule should be introduced.

Firstly irish prison.system.js ran on an incentivised regime. Majority of prisoners work or go to school. Very very few dont.

Protective custody prisoners cant work they are only able to avail of school for obvious reasons. Wheatfield is entirely working prison as is halfbof what used to be St pats young offenders prison, the other half is on protection. All open jails work. Only prison.Where majority dont work would be portlaoise prison.

freshpopcorn

Didn't Lucinda want to introduce a three strike rule?

Beyondgone

freshpopcorn wrote: »

Didn't Lucinda want to introduce a three strike rule?

Lucinda always wants something.

Samuel T. Cogley

Anyway I've dragged this OT enough. If you want proper information on pay - ask in Legal Discussions they'll give you a much better insight than I. You could even join the discussion on the SC that made almost €1m from the state last year

(Not on the criminal side).

We should do everything wee can to reduce recidivism and crime in general. The simple plain fact is that's not harsher sentences or conditions. Work would be a fantastic way of teaching people new skills.