Overusing the Criminal Justice System: the Case of Ireland

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This report explores the use of criminalisation, prosecution, and punishment in Ireland. Ireland is currently in an interesting phase of development concerning its penal policy. Over the last five years, Ireland's prison population has fallen, reflecting new strategic priorities for the Government and its criminal justice agencies established in 2011. There has been a move since that time to reduce the use of imprisonment, and has given rise to some efforts at diversion away from the criminal justice system, from the prison system, and through the use of back door strategies to reduce the prison population. There have been fewer developments in the realm of reducing the use of criminalisation itself. Discussions in Ireland, both at the policy and scholarly levels, of the possibilities for legalisation, decriminalisation and policy tolerance are surprisingly limited, although the use of alternatives to prosecution is emerging as a topic of possible reform.

OVERUSE OF CRIMINALISATION

The key sources of information for crime rates in Ireland now come from the Central Statistics Office, Ireland's national statistics authority. Until 2006 crime statistics were published by the Irish police force (An Garda Siochana). It should be noted that additional caution, over and above that which should be exercised concerning all official crime statistics, is necessary when examining Irish recorded crime statistics. In 2014, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) suspended publication of crime statistics following a report by the Garda Inspectorate which highlighted concerns about the ways in which crimes and detections were being recorded by members of the police service. Publication was resumed in June 2015, but the CSO continues to recommend caution when examining detection rates in particular.

At the time of writing, more serious concerns have arisen in Ireland about the quality of crime data as supplied to the Central Statistics Office by An Garda Siochana. The effect of this was that the Central Statistics Office suspended publication of Recorded Crime data in March 2017. It was decided to resume publication in 2018. However, it has been decided to publish such data under the category “under reservation”, which means, according to the Central Statistics Office that it serves to “indicate to users that the quality of these statistics do not meet the standards required of official statistics published by the CSO”.