Dáil Éireann - 29/Jun/1960 Criminal Justice Bill, 1960—Second Stage (Resumed).

Dáil Éireann - 29/Jun/1960 Criminal Justice Bill, 1960—Second Stage (Resumed).I am thinking now of a young boy or, worse still, a young girl, although the situation does not arise with girls because as a rule courts do not send a girl to prison. Take a young person who gets into trouble and for whom there is no alternative but to give him a term in jail, if he has been cautioned two or three times and manifestly is going to continue on his course of conduct. He gets say one month in jail. How can it be desirable that that young person should be brought into contact with the other type of prisoners who habituate a penal institution like Mountjoy and who are manifestly quite unsuitable as company for a reckless youth, whom all of us are concerned not alone to check but to redeem? I refer not only to those categories of persons who have been guilty of grave moral delinquency but any decent citizen who gets into trouble which brings him into jail. He has had enough woe surely without equating him in jail with tramps, winers, and “knackers” and all the flotsam and jetsam of prison life with which ordinarily he would have no common contact and with which for his own salvation he should never be identified either in his own mind or in the minds of those into whose care he has been committed when he is sent to jail.?