Prison Expansion in Ireland: Treating a Symptom, not the Disease

9 Dec

By Keith Adams*

The illness of overincarceration has been spreading for decades in the Irish prison system. It will not be cured with a single intervention but a steady course of decarceral treatments. Similarly, decades of State neglect of communities will require a long-term commitment of resources. But having the correct diagnosis is a vital starting point for a response.

The criminal justice system in Ireland is deeply unwell. There are many signs and symptoms of its illness and disorder. Ireland’s liberal usage of the prison as the centrepiece of its justice system has inevitably produced its overcrowding “crisis”. Yet, it continues with little sign of any changes towards developing a justice system where communities flourish and social conflict is resolved without using coercive confinement.

Overcrowding: Symptom or Illness?

On the night of Monday, 24th November 2025, there were 633 men and women trying to sleep on mattresses on the floor of overcrowded prison cells. This is the equivalent to the entire capacity of Cork and Limerick prisons together on cold and unhygienic floors. From many corners, prison overcrowding has been called a “crisis” – something that could not have been predicted but forced upon an already busy Government.

To solve this crisis, the Minister for Justice has committed to an expansion of the prison system. The target for 2031, in six years’ time, is to build and retrofit an additional 1,595 prison spaces. Half a billion euro (or €495 million) is committed by the Government to deliver this agreed-upon policy choice. A new prison will be built on the site of the old Cork Prison, while an additional eight prisons will see further expansion to existing buildings. For some, this does not go far enough or fast enough, with the Prison Officers Association claiming that, even if expansion happened tomorrow, prisons would remain overcrowded. Unintentionally, and with their own agenda, some truth may have been spoken here. No country has ever reduced overcrowding through building more capacity, rather it has created demand. Maybe Ireland will be the exception.

For the Department of Justice, the current levels of overcrowding are understood and treated as the illness. That only if more cells were to be provided to the Irish Prison Service, then the stated goal of “safe” and “humane” imprisonment would be reached. The illness would be cured, and the patient would return to their previous health. But what if the Department and Minister are wrong in their diagnosis? What if overcrowding is only a symptom, and they have not diagnosed the illness correctly at all?

Other Departments make similar errors in their diagnoses of societal problems. Homelessness is similarly not a crisis. It is the natural outcome or symptom of a housing system which has been designed around the demands for profit by a private market which is never satisfied. The traffic jams in our towns and cities are understood as lack of road capacity, rather than a prioritisation of the private motorcar over buses, trains, cycling and walking. By confusing symptom and illness, the correct cure can’t be found.

Overincarceration: A Societal Illness

The illness that has spread through the criminal justice system, however, is not overcrowding but that of overincarceration. In Ireland, overincarceration is seen through the excessive use of imprisonment for issues overwhelmingly requiring a health and social care response. This is producing inhumane conditions of confinement. Meals are eaten beside unpartitioned toilets. Deaths of people in custody are increasing. In essence, overincarceration results from the prison being the default means to resolve social conflict and the displacement of an appropriate community-based health and social care response.

But to choose to spend half a billion euro on more prison spaces is to make a political decision not to allocate public resources to develop other rehabilitative supports. Public finances, which could be used to develop community drug and alcohol services, youth programmes and domestic violence services, are diverted into expanding a prison system that just doesn’t work.

Of late, prisons are beginning to even seep into our immigration policy. With the hardening of our asylum system, overcrowded prisons are now being used for administrative detention in the weeks prior to forced deportation or for people who present without valid travel documents. The legal mechanism to prosecute people who arrive in Ireland without documentation has been contained in the 2004 Immigration Act; with a fine up to €3,000 and/or up to 12 months in prison. As reported by the Dublin Inquirer, there has been a policy decision to now prosecute these cases as the Garda National Immigration Bureau are “testing” the impact of stricter enforcement of the requirement. Alongside this “test,” the Department of Justice have instructed the Irish Prison Service to exclude immigration detainees from temporary release from prison.

With one eye on the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum and the other on whatever new migration hardship the United Kingdom is implementing on a weekly basis, the Irish Government has wholeheartedly committed to strengthening its national borders. This is with the stated aim of not having Ireland appear more favourable than the UK towards refugees and migrants. Family reunification, asylum accommodation and citizenship waiting times have all been changed.

Yet, to stop there is to miss something important. Government parties and TDs are also mindful of far-right nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Ireland. The Irish media’s fixation on the spoiled ballots in the recent Presidential election will lead some politicians to wonder if these voters’ affections can be courted. The rise in far-right nationalism, both domestically and internationally, is fuelling Ireland’s overincarceration. More asylum seekers and migrants are finding themselves in prison for varying lengths of time to satisfy the appetite of far-right agitators and elected representatives.

Decarceral Treatment

What is needed is a new treatment approach, one that aims to reduce the size of the prison population by investing in communities rather than expand its capacity.

To continue to treat prison overcrowding through prison expansion is akin to providing the cancer patient with mild pain relief while allowing the tumours to grow and spread around the body. The pain relief may mask the symptoms of the primary illness for a while, but untreated, the symptoms will multiply and intensify. Overcrowding is now accompanied by closed prison schools and workshops, solitary confinement, and increasing staff-on-prisoner violence.

Overcrowding can only be ended with a decarceral approach, which takes seriously the illness of overincarceration. In her book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis summarises decarceration as “a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.” Or put simply, decarceration is the opposite of incarceration and it means an active and intentional strategy towards reducing the number of people in prison or other places of confinement.

So, what would decarceration look like in Ireland? I think there are three obvious steps that would mark a change of policy towards the problem of overincarceration and its symptoms of overcrowding. Which if implemented, would begin to decentre the place of the prison in Irish society and new community-based responses can be nurtured.

First, the Minister and Department of Justice should acknowledge that prison does not work for any of its stated aims of rehabilitation or deterrence. As 2025 is the 40th anniversary of the Whitaker Report, it would be an appropriate time to say that the prison expansion experiment has failed. It has had four decades. The problem is to not acknowledge this and then double-down on the wrong treatment.

Second, a legally enforceable cap on prison numbers needs to be implemented based on the number of available cells. All the single-person cells which have been doubled-up and tripled-up in the past decades should be returned to single-person usage, offering basic privacy to people. This would see a legal cap of 3,496 people in our current prison system, just over 2,000 less people than today’s population. For new people to enter the prison system, a sentencing court would have to ensure that a bed is available, a system similar to Oberstown Detention Centre.

Third, if there is half a billion euro available for more prisons, then it remains that there is also half a billion euro available for housing, addiction, and community mental health supports. This money should be diverted to programmes which can address some of the personal issues resulting in conflict with the criminal justice system. Nobody should be released from prison to homelessness. Programmes like Housing First can quickly provide non-stigmatising, independent housing if expanded. Many of the communities where people in prison originate require long-term investment in whole-of-life support from childcare to elder-care, from education to secure housing, from employment to high quality shared spaces. The key issue is that the funding, like what is clearly possible for capital investment, is for as long as is required and not short-term.

Diagnosis alone is not enough, it is only the starting point for the correct treatment of overincarceration.