Reassessing the penal system

Now that Parliament has risen for the summer recess, I found the time and the opportunity to spend some time analysing statistics given by the Minister of Justice in Parliament regarding a number of matters.

What really impressed me is the cost of the upkeep of the country's prison system, which is outrageous. It costs the Exchequer far more to provide for the needs of a prison inmate than to educate a student at tertiary level. In fact, the bill the government has to foot for every individual in this regard is almost €20,000 per annum.

According to the figures given by the Justice Minister, the prison population nowadays averages about 600 inmates. Each inmate will cost the government in excess of €50 a day to maintain. This means that it's costing the taxpayer about €10 million a year to sustain the present prison population and this apart from other ancillary expenses, such as the general maintenance and upkeep of the building itself.

It is no secret that the prison is bursting at the seams. According to the minister, who was replying to a parliamentary question, the prison is intended, at the very most, to accommodate a maximum of 553 prisoners. Notwithstanding this, the prison population remains constantly on the increase. As a matter of interest, over a period of 20 years, the increase has been, to say the least, overwhelming and amounts to almost 600 per cent.

There is no hard and fast rule as to why this should be the case. One of the main reasons behind this phenomenon could easily be the substantial increase in foreign inmates who today make up about 40 per cent of the entire population. This alone, however, does not clearly explain or justify the explosion in the prison population.

Further statistics will demonstrate that this rise is neither the result of an overall increase in crime over the last few years because this, happily enough, seems to have been quite minimal, nor can it be attributed to any drastic increase in court judgments. Surprisingly, it seems that, over the last few years, the judiciary has, for various reasons, been more apt in handing down prison terms than previously and this notwithstanding new attitudes to crime and punishments.

The problem of prison overcrowding is not only felt in Malta but elsewhere too. In the UK, for example, the authorities that be are endeavouring to address this national problem holistically. Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has gone a record questioning, among other things, whether short-term prison sentences provide good value for money because they appear to be failing to reform criminals. Furthermore, probation officers and prison governors in that country are strongly recommending that low-level crimes should result, more often than not, in community punishments. All this has been brought to the forefront as the Minister of Justice examines ways on cutting down on the expenditure made with regard to the prison.

Here in Malta, short-term prison terms regarding low-level crimes are becoming ever more frequent. More worrying, we see that, over the last few years, hundreds of persons have been given custodial sentences for administrative omissions and failing to pay relative court penalties or fines. This too could prove to be a strong contributing factor to the drastic increase in the prison population.

Though relative provisions in the penal code with regard to community punishments have been in existence for quite some time now, it seems that the courts are still reluctant in imposing such alternative punishments and, perhaps, they are also facing strong administrative and bureaucratic difficulties in imposing such alternative sanctions.

On a positive note, the minister has taken note of the difficulties facing the courts in this regard. In this respect, therefore, the law has been further amended as to facilitate the award of such alternative sentences. Hopefully, all this will eventually lead to the desired drop in the prison population; thereby saving the taxpayer substantial funds and strengthening the reformative aspect of penal law.

Dr Herrera is a Labour member of Parliament.