This is an NGO that we, the taxpayers, fund to work towards FEWER prison sentences.

Yesterday, the Director of Public Prosecutions launched an appeal against the sentence handed to Cathal Crotty for assaulting Natasha O’Brien in Limerick in 2022 – arguing that the judge had shown “undue leniency” in imposing a suspended sentence.

Reports of the verdict sparked outrage and much media comment, with Ms O’Brien saying she felt the justice system should “do better” and wanted judges to receive “sensitivity training” to help them deal with victims of crime.

The DPP’s office says that appeal court judges will only consider a sentence to be “unduly lenient” if they believe the trial judge made an error on a point of law. “The appeal court will not change a sentence simply because it believes the sentence was unduly lenient or because they would have given a different sentence,” it explains.

The events of the last week and the previous controversy over suspended sentences indicate that this is an issue of concern among the Irish public.

In a 2021 survey conducted by the Department of Justice, respondents were asked what specific aspects of the Irish criminal justice system they felt most needed improvement. “Responses to this question were spontaneous and no guidance was provided by interviewers,” the department said in a report.

While the main issue raised by respondents (one in six, or 16 per cent) was increasing police visibility, the next most frequently mentioned issue, cited by 11 per cent of those surveyed, was imposing longer sentences.

As the chart above shows, a further 2 per cent believe the criminal justice system is “too lenient on young offenders” and the same number believe court proceedings “take too long”.

After news of Crotty’s suspended sentence broke, protests erupted across the country, calling for courts to impose harsher sentences, particularly in cases of violence against women and sexual assault.

Welcoming the DPP’s decision to appeal Crotty’s conviction, Natasha O’Brien said: “I know the DPP is impartial to public and government opinion, but I have no doubt that this appeal would not have happened had it not been for the national outcry.”

He is probably right, although the DPP’s office could never admit it, but his decision and the furore surrounding the case should draw attention to the work of an influential NGO that seeks to shorten, not increase, prison sentences and whose mission is to create a “fair, humane Ireland where prison is the last resort”.

This is significant because the Irish Penal Reform Trust is, as always, supported by taxpayers’ money – the Department of Justice, Department of Rural and Community Development and IHREC have contributed almost €1.5 million to the Trust since 2019.

As their website states, this work has an important goal: “a national penal policy that is fair, humane, evidence-based, and uses incarceration as a last resort.”

The foundation says it advocates for a “progressive criminal justice system that prioritizes alternatives to prison, defends human rights, and advocates for reintegration.”

They seem to be very opposed to sending criminals to prison, offering alternatives such as “community sanctions and alternatives to custody for minor offences”
crimes”, which they said should help “ensure that deprivation of liberty becomes, in fact, a sanction of last resort”.

I think it is worth asking victims of crime whether they think prison should become a ‘last resort’, especially in light of the public outcry over the convictions over the past week or more.

The foundation says it has “made a clear impact on the Government Programme for 2020” and cites numerous occasions on which it has tabled submissions and appeared before various Oireachtas committees in an attempt to influence elected representatives on its mission.

The hope is to “influence relevant national policies and legislation so that effective non-custodial responses become the default response to less serious crimes”, adding that success will be measured when “the principle of imprisonment as a last resort is embedded in policy, expressed in legislation and reflected in practice”.

The foundation has previously recommended “training judges in sentencing and raising awareness among professional groups, lawyers and judges about the availability and characteristics of social sanctions.”

It also argues that “deprivation of liberty itself causes serious social harm and should therefore be used sparingly at the point of sentencing when non-custodial alternatives are not available or are considered inappropriate” – and opposes mandatory sentencing and “presumptive minimum” sentencing, where a judge must impose a specified minimum sentence except in exceptional circumstances.

It is difficult to say what influence organisations such as the IRPT have on sentencing and attitudes in the legal system; there are important discussions about the impact and purpose of sentencing and penal policy.

Needless to say, the IPRT has every right to call for prison reform and does important work around prisoners’ rights and helping children of incarcerated prisoners. However, its position is in stark contrast to the calls for harsher sentencing that we have heard daily since the Natasha O’Brien ruling.

Again, they have every right to pursue a mission that aims to increase, not decrease, the severity of punishment – ​​because the real problem is that, as usual, the political establishment speaks two languages.

Much of the political outrage we have witnessed this past week, from impassioned speeches to standing ovations in the Dáil, has come from the same people who also oversee the funding and support of an entire NGO that believes prisons are wrong and should only be used as a “last resort”.

(The IPRT lists as one of its achievements the cancellation of plans for a super-prison at Thornton Hall. They appear to have less to say about the current plans to build a huge asylum centre there, although they have issued a report expressing concerns about Irish judges who rely heavily on “the assumption that foreign nationals with no links to the state pose a greater risk of flight than Irish nationals”.)

In fact, Labour leader Ivana Bacik is a patron of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. Last week she called on the Justice Minister “to confirm that he will initiate a review of sentencing practices, in particular the practice of suspending custodial sentences for violent crimes. It is time to act decisively to ensure that our legal system delivers real justice and support for victims of violent crime.”

How does patronage of an organisation that aims to reduce the number of prison sentences connect with a call to urge the Minister of Justice to “act decisively” to deliver justice in the context of a case in which a suspended sentence has sparked public outrage?

There is a public perception that the courts are becoming too lenient towards criminal behaviour, with critics pointing to cases such as the recent suspended sentence handed to an English language student who entered the bedroom of his 79-year-old landlady and sexually assaulted her.

The problem – as always in Ireland, to the point of seeming deliberate and intended to obfuscate – is the lack of sentencing data. Current sentencing data is “deeply limited and inadequate for its purpose”, according to a 2023 report by the Judicial Council Sentencing Guidelines and Information Committee (SGIC).

The lack of a central dataset that offers insight into actual sentencing practices poses a “serious” risk to public trust, the report says.

We should also not trust a political establishment that, on the one hand, funds and supports an NGO that seeks to ensure that prisons are used only as a “last resort”, while at the same time making empty gestures in terms of sentencing when public sentiment deteriorates due to suspended sentences.

We don’t really know whether sentences have become more lenient overall – or whether judges are being influenced by campaigns or cultural changes that argue that rehabilitation and the rights of offenders can be more important than punishment for misdemeanours and imprisonment, reflecting society’s rejection of certain types of behaviour.