*A former hotel on Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin city centre is to be turned in to a homeless hostel.
It comes seven years after it was bought by Dublin City Council for almost €7m.
The council will publish plans this week to convert Longfields Hotel into emergency accommodation run by the Simon community.
Judges are sending people to jail without knowing what goes on there or how the experience will affect them, a leading social justice campaigner has claimed.
Fr Peter McVerry
said prison discriminated against the homeless and mentally ill and
damaged inmates’ prospects of ever positively contributing to society. www.pmvtrust.ie
He
told a conference hosted by the Irish Human Rights and Equality
Commission and the Law Society of Ireland that imprisonment should be
reserved for the most serious crimes, mainly those involving violence.
He argued that jailing someone for three months for a public order offence was “absurd”, citing the case of a young man jailed for such an offence committed a year earlier when he was homeless and battling for custody of his child.
In the interim 12 months, he secured accommodation and got custody of his child, both of which he lost when imprisoned. On release he was homeless again and more angry and frustrated than ever.
“Most judges have little understanding of what life in prison is like, or what life in prison does to a person. Prison can not and should not be used to teach people a lesson or to give someone a short sharp shock,” he said.
He said overcrowding in prisons was encouraging drug use and fuelling violence, and that often the only way to create a space was by giving early release to another prisoner, even if that prisoner was meant to be serving a longer sentence than the new arrival.
Homeless
prisoners, however, were not considered for early release “no matter how
constructively they have spent their time in prison”. They were also
more likely than a person with an address to be remanded in custody than
released on bail while awaiting hearing and were more likely to be
imprisoned on conviction.
“The irony is that prison is the only one-stop shop available to them where many of their needs will be addressed. There they will get accommodation, three meals a day, their medical needs will be looked after, and they have no financial headaches. Some people he knew deliberately got arrested so they could return to prison.
Fr McVerry, who has been making prison visits for 40 years, made a special plea for alternatives to prison for people with mental illness.
“I visit one young man who believes that aliens have taken over the world, that he has been poisoned with radioactive material, that he is a qualified doctor and many more delusions. He is regularly arrested on minor public order offences, but he invariably forgets to turn up in court and ends up remanded in custody.”
“Prison is often used to deal with people whose problems society is unwilling or unable to address. In doing so, we further damage them and society.”
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ENDS:
He argued that jailing someone for three months for a public order offence was “absurd”, citing the case of a young man jailed for such an offence committed a year earlier when he was homeless and battling for custody of his child.
In the interim 12 months, he secured accommodation and got custody of his child, both of which he lost when imprisoned. On release he was homeless again and more angry and frustrated than ever.
“Most judges have little understanding of what life in prison is like, or what life in prison does to a person. Prison can not and should not be used to teach people a lesson or to give someone a short sharp shock,” he said.
He said overcrowding in prisons was encouraging drug use and fuelling violence, and that often the only way to create a space was by giving early release to another prisoner, even if that prisoner was meant to be serving a longer sentence than the new arrival.
“The irony is that prison is the only one-stop shop available to them where many of their needs will be addressed. There they will get accommodation, three meals a day, their medical needs will be looked after, and they have no financial headaches. Some people he knew deliberately got arrested so they could return to prison.
Fr McVerry, who has been making prison visits for 40 years, made a special plea for alternatives to prison for people with mental illness.
“I visit one young man who believes that aliens have taken over the world, that he has been poisoned with radioactive material, that he is a qualified doctor and many more delusions. He is regularly arrested on minor public order offences, but he invariably forgets to turn up in court and ends up remanded in custody.”
“Prison is often used to deal with people whose problems society is unwilling or unable to address. In doing so, we further damage them and society.”
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ENDS:
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