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This view was reinforced in a study by McDaid (1999) where he found 73% of those
surveyed supported non-custodial sanctions, such as fines, community service and
probation in preference to custodial penalties for certain crimes. The survey also found
significant support for rehabilitative measures rather than punitive measures for juvenile
anddrug-relatedoffending.
The National Crime Forumsought to place prison in the sentencingcontinuumas follows:
The Forum endorses the call for a fundamental change of focus to make prison the
option of last resort, to be used sparinglyand onlywhen all other options have been
tried or considered and ruled out for cogent reasons (National Crime Forum Report
1998:142).
In contrast with these soundings of social attitude to the use of imprisonment in the period
1997 to 1999 in Ireland, the imprisonment rate of prisoners per 100,000 of the general
population rose by 23% (Walmsley 1999) in contrast with England and Wales where the
figure was 4% and 1% in Scotland. 50 Moreover this staggering rate of increase in the
imprisonment rate was accompanied by a stabilising or falling crime rate in Ireland during
the same period. The political background to this phenomenon included a general
election which was largely fought on the rhetoric of zero tolerance, a model of strict
policing technology imported from the Eastern United States, which at a superficial level
promised a significant reduction in criminal behaviour. However, the falling crime rate
was well established before the Fianna Fail led Government which promoted zero
tolerance as a policy came into power in 1997, leading some writers to contend that tough
sentencing measures such as “zero tolerance” and “three-strikes” may not have direct
applicability to the decrease in the crime rate in Ireland during that period (O’Donnell and
O’Sullivan 2001). The decrease in the crime rate mayhave been affected byanother factor
which was central to the debate to introduce community service in 1983. The issue of
prison over-crowding and the constant need by the Department of Justice and the Prison
Service to shed prisoners from the prisons to allow for the intake of more recently
committed offenders was partially addressed after the murders of Garda Gerry McCabe in
Co. Limerick and journalist Veronica Guerin in Dublin, by an extensive prison building
50 O’Donnell (2005:7) however has demonstrated the rate of imprisonment in Ireland has not grown at all in the period 1992-2003. Instead, he claims, it has
fallen sharply. He attributes the relative stabilityin the prison population or anygrowth thereof not as an increase in the rate of committals per 100,000 of the
population but to other factors such as restrictions on the right to bail, longer sentences andincreasedremands of illegal immigrants.
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