Irish jails were operating at such extreme levels of overcrowding that senior officials warned they might not be able to take any new inmates and would struggle to produce prisoners at court.
In a stark warning, the Director General of the Irish Prison Service said the country’s main remand prison was at 125 percent capacity and only had room for three more people.
Caron McCaffrey said once those three mattresses were used, there would be “no further secure accommodation” available at Cloverhill Prison.
Ms McCaffrey said six jails were operating at capacities of between 123 and 154 percent of their intended capacity.
She said there was an “unprecedented risk” in the penal system because of the worsening overcrowding crisis.
A letter to the Department of Justice said: “It is likely our ability to continue to receive committals out of hours, our ability to produce ever increasing numbers of prisoners to court and our ability to accommodate prisoners once we run out of secure cell accommodation will be impacted in the coming weeks and months.”
The Director General said the situation was now “critical” and asked for an urgent meeting of a taskforce on overcrowding.
At the time the letter was sent last October, there were 5,581 people in custody, 20 percent above designed capacity.
Ms McCaffrey wrote: “Certain prisons are now under extreme duress as a result of operating at higher-than-average capacity.”
She forwarded a paper from the UK on how they had managed a similar overcrowding crisis, in particular around setting “operational capacity limits.”
The review paper was withheld under FOI but can be found at this link.