The Director of Oberstown Children’s Detention Campus has highlighted the importance of early intervention in tackling youth offending.
The comments come following a week of scrutiny of young people who are engaging in criminal activity.
Damien Hernon Director of Oberstown Children Detention Campus, said “our demographic is pretty typical, the characteristics are typical of the young people who come in … recreational drug users, absent parents, non-school attendance.
“So that principle of early intervention and how we enhance that across the different groups may make an impact,” he added.
Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week Mr Hernon said that the practice of detention as a last resort for the shortest time possible, is critical in reducing youth offending rates in the future.
“I meet with the president of the district court regularly and he will tell you they go to extreme lengths to try and keep young people out of detention, because if we accept that someone comes into detention at 14 years of age, the chances are they have a much higher chance then that they’re going to be in detention throughout their teenage years into adult life.”
Mr Hernon also acknowledged that there has been an increase in serious offences by young people.
“Across recent years the tariff of offences has increased from sexually harmful behaviour to taking people’s lives either through manslaughter or murder. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, I suppose, across the last four or six years,” he said.
“That creates a certain set of challenges because of the complexity of behaviours associated with that.”
“Oberstown has had to respond to that through a different set of measures, through our programme team, through our key working team, through what we call a placement planning process, which monitors where young people are at in terms of their behaviour and how they’re moving along within their programme,” he added.
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Work to rule strikes
Mr Hernon also called for a halt to a work-to-rule-protest among Oberstown staff, saying that the industrial action had potential to increase risk.
The State’s only child-detention facility is engaged in an industrial relations dispute with its employees over concerns about safe staffing levels.
“I would be urging everybody to step this down to allow us progress the matters that we feel can be progressed … but in order for that to happen, there needs to be a ceasefire. The action needs to be stepped down.”
Fórsa union members have backed industrial action up to and including a full withdrawal of labour, with the union saying workers have previously reported “assaults on staff and injuries requiring hospital treatment in circumstances where staffing levels were stretched”.
Mr Hernon maintained that Oberstown’s health and safety data had improved.
He said there had been a “40% reduction on physical interventions to date. That means there’s been 30 physical interventions this year, all low level.
“I urge you to test that against any other detention facility in the State or in Europe,” he added.
Mr Hernon said that Oberstown has a good record in retaining staff, “33% have between 5 and 20 years’ service and another 33% have 20 years”.
Oberstown consistently runs close to capacity and this has reportedly led to incidents where youths in conflict with the law have been released on bail rather than being detained.
Mr Hernon said that the campus has one bed available today and in the last year the facility had spent 135 days at full capacity.
Oberstown is licenced for an overall capacity of 46, catering for 42 males and 4 females.
Mr Hernon said that “over the last couple of months, we have had no referrals that have been refused. We’ve had room throughout June, July and August to take young people who’ve been referred through the courts”.
“We don’t have a revolving door. I don’t have the authority to release people similar to the Prison Service,” he added.