Counting the cost of Ireland's prisons: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2004/01/11 > Counting the cost of Ireland's prisons

Counting the cost of Ireland's prisons
Sunday, January 11, 2004

Michael McDowell By Barry O Kelly, Crime Correspondent

In just five years, prison service staff levels have rocketed by 400 per cent while the workload, in terms of prisoner numbers, has risen by 30 per cent.

The extra 2,500 staff, for the most part, underwent a nine week training course to become prison officers with a starting salary of €24,200. Within a couple of years, they enjoyed an average salary of €61,000.

The prison service, headed byJustice Department veteran Sean Aylward, claims it is now time to get tough with this vast new army of 3,300 employees, who are statistically the most overworked and, paradoxically, the most prone to absenteeism in the civil service.

A management consultant might take a broader approach in assessing the financial effectiveness of the prison service than simply looking at the performance of the troops.

The prison service problem is not a new one. The performance rates of officers were regarded as appalling back in 1997, before the spate of hirings took place. Now, Ireland has an extra 2,500 warders andanescalating overtime problem.

Moreover, the Midlands Prison, a state of the art facility complete with biometric security and electronic gates and operating at 73 per cent capacity, has replaced the revolving door prison system.

This translates as 170 spare prison spaces that are not being used - the equivalent of a facility bigger than the Curragh Prison.

Portlaoise Jail is operating at 67 per cent capacity. This, the public is told, is due to the assortment of dissident republican groups in the jail. Portlaoise is the most expensive jail in the prison service. The average cost of keeping a prisoner there is more than €200,000 per year.

In simpler terms, the 20-year-sentence imposed on the crime figure John Gilligan will cost the taxpayer - at current rates - more than €4 million, although with good behaviour the cost could be slashed to €3 million.

And Gilligan is hardly an average prisoner. In fact, 1,448 people who went to jail in Ireland in 2002 - the latest period for which statistics are available - were sent there for road traffic offences. They represented more than a quarter of the people committed to prison.

The average cost of keeping a prisoner was €84,000, or about a third more than the salary of a prison officer.

Prison officers claim that salaries constitute the real issue behind their row with the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell. Another sticking point is a proposal by prison management to introduce a new auxiliary grade of prison officer. These officers would be paid athird of what warders currently receive.

With up to a quarter of prison officers able to avail of early retirement packages in the next seven years, their replacements could be the new yellow packs.

However, McDowell and the prison service insist that overtime is the key issue, and they are pushing for a deal whereby the prison officers perform a compulsory €10,000 worth of overtime - 360 hours - per year. A onceoff payment of €12,000 is the only carrot on offer.

But the warder pay rates cannot have escaped McDowell's attention. In civil service terms, prison officers are paid too much. Teachers, after four years in university, have a similar starting salary, but end up with a third less at the end of the scale. Even garda officers, who confront similar dangers, are paid less than prison officers.

Overtime ac counts for €19,000 of the average prison officer's annual wages of €61,000. An English warder gets €47,000, a Scottish one €33,000 and in the North of Ireland the salary is €44,000.

During the expansion of the service the minister pledged to tackle the soaring overtime bill and the associated problem of absenteeism head-on.

A fifth of all overtime was due to prison officers reporting sick. In 1998, the overtime bill was »30 million (e38 million). The Prison Service Operating Review G roup declared that year: "Since 1992, a vigorous policy has been pursued with a view to reducing absences." This policy included sanctions on officers who incurred excessive sick leave.

The group observed, however, that while initially large gains were made as a result of this approach, by 1995 and 1996 this progress had begun to reverse.

In 1999, the then Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue - t h e man who rubber stamped the 400 per cent increase in staffing levels and the building of 1,200 extra prison cells - announced a war on overtime. It would be cut by 40 per cent, he pledged.

When O'Donoghue left office two years later, the overtime rate was still creeping up.

Last year, the overtime bill stood at a record €60 million, accounting for around a quarter of the prison officer pay bill.

Prison managers roster operational staff to provide continuous 24-hour cover at all prisons. Any gaps in operational cover that arise from officers on sick leave must be covered by calling in off duty officers on overtime.

In a report published two years ago, the Prison Service Staffing and Operations Review Team (Sort) suggested that managers do not have the necessary skills to determine any likely root cause of absenteeism.

Prison governors, it also emerged, do not have the power to dismiss civil servants.

The latest figures show prison officers on average cry off sick 19 days a year. These sick levels are twice those in the civil service and three times the rate in private industry. But the prison service cannot unilaterally introduce measures inconsistent with the terms of the civil servant agreements.

Some prisons are sick-leave blackspots. In Cork Prison, on average a warder reports sick 34 days per year - almost double the average in the prison service. Warders in Portlaoise Prison report sick 24 days per year, at a cost to the taxpayer of more than €1 million.

So why is it that prison officers in other jails, notably Arbour Hill, are less prone to sickness? (See table.) "This rais es the question as to whether there are specific institutional or management factors at work in this prison which contribute to the relatively low rate of sick leave," said the Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell.

In a report on prison sick leave last year, Purcell ob-served: "There may be useful lessons to be learned by the prisons service from studying any such factors with a view to bringing about a climate in other prisons conducive to lower levels of sick leave."

Purcell studied the sick leave patterns from 1999 to 2002 and identified a relatively small number of allegedly chronically unhealthy prison officers.

"For example, Cork Prison had the highest number of individual officers (16) with a continuous period of sick absence in excess of 183 days. Limerick Prison had 13 such officers. Seventy-five officers throughout the Prison Service, who had been continuously absent on sick leave for 183 or more days ac counted for 27,600 of the total days (179,000) lost in the three-year period."

He continued: "The prison service states that newer recruits who are on probation do not avail of as much sick leave as older officers. In addition, it believes that older officers appear to make themselves more available for longer overtime and unsociable working assignments."

However, Purcell highlighted some interesting statistics regarding the management of sick leave in prisons abroad. In New South Wales, Australia, prison bosses had modified rostered activities, duties and shifts which were historically prone to higher levels of sick leave.

To date, the prison service has not carried out research in this area, but has promised to do so. Could it be that prison officer overtime is avicious cycle: the more overtime they work, the sicker they get, the greater the need to bring other officers on overtime?

In a 2001 prison managers report, obtained by The Sunday Business Post under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), officials spoke of a culture of absenteeism.

"There is no peer pressure on officers to remain at work," the report stated. "In fact, the contrary is the case - an officer's absence may be seen as an opportunity for more overtime for his colleagues."

Prison officer sources insist that there is an even deeper malaise. "We are dealing with violent people day in, day out. There's little or no attempt at rehabilitation, slopping out is still routine, and we're in the front line when there's trouble," said one officer.

The overtime issue, he claimed, was a non-issue. "It's all about getting agreement on the yellow packs."

There is now a bitter, focused anger towards McDowell over what they perceive as a Thatcherite, take-it-orleave-it style of negotiating stance. Talk of a threatened strike is real,prison officers insist.

The minister insists he will press ahead with the closure of Spike Island, Loughan House and the Curragh within a matter of weeks in order to balance the books. Probation officers are expected to manage some of the inmates.

If it comes to a strike, with the army running the prisons, McDowell will find an unexpected supporter among the seasoned prison population.

"The army treated us much better last time,"said John Gilligan, a resident in Portlaoise, and a veteran of the last prison officers' dispute in the 1980s.

"Everybody says it. They treated us with respect and the food was 100 per cent better. It was like a restaurant in Mountjoy. None of us broke up the place. The prison officers didn't scratch our backs, so we weren't going to scratch theirs."

If peace were to prevail during a strike, McDowell could immediately set about saving the prison service a lot of money with free work carried out by soldiers - who would presumably have been paid anyway for other duties - that would otherwise have cost the state around €4 million per week.