Analysis: Christmas amnesties for prisoners peaked in 1995 with 390 granted temporary release, but numbers have since swiftly declined
By Keith Adams, Leuven Institute of Criminology
Prisoner Amnesties
In 1979, during Pope John Paul II's visit to Ireland, the Minister for Justice recommended that 68 prisoners be released to mark the occasion. The persons released in this amnesty were deemed "unlikely to be dangerous to the public" and were all due for release later in the year. However, always sensitive to public outrage, the Minister also recommended that the group should not be released until the final day of the papal itinerary. In a Department of Justice memo to Government, the reasoning was provided;
"It is considered that it would be unwise to take the risk of releasing a large number of offenders during the first day of the visit when Dublin’s dwelling houses will be virtually empty and releases on Sunday would pose staffing and transport problems."
Previously, other occasions—usually major religious events— also led to more general prisoner amnesties taking place, yet they were often moderated by concerns of a more practical nature. In this case, fear of burglaries in the empty homes of massgoers at the Phoenix Park.
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From RTÉ Archives, Pope John Paul II visits Ireland in 1979
Christmas Temporary Release
Temporary release for prisoners was legislated for in Ireland under the Criminal Justice Act 1960. Prisoners were increasingly released for either short periods during their sentence or fully released before their sentence was complete. They were also permitted to leave prison to join their families for Christmas, for periods ranging from a few hours to seven nights.
In a Dáil debate in December 1962, then Minister for Justice Charles Haughey said he would consider "granting temporary release to a number of well-conducted prisoners to enable them to spend the holy season of Christmas with their families." Furthermore, when exercising his decision-making on those to be released, he would take into account 'the nature of their offences, the previous record, the home environment, the good conduct and industry while under sentence and any factors which, in my opinion, will lead to reform and rehabilitation'.
In December 1964, Brian Lenihan Snr announced his intention to honour Christmas by releasing 40 prisoners with short sentences remaining, and granting ten days of temporary release to 35 more prisoners.
Read more: How Limerick's new 'healing' prison points to progressive reform
The practice of temporary release expanded in the 1970s. Alongside mass releases for events like Papal visits, regular prisoner amnesties also occurred at Easter and Christmas. Making sense of Irish civil servants’ actions to create a porous prison system, Louise Brangan suggests that this desire was rooted in Ireland’s traditional and conservative social order, which prioritised the values of community and family.
While other countries were focused on progressive individual rights, Ireland’s communitarian Catholic ideals led to the prison being understood as detrimental to those conservative values of family and community. Prisoners were viewed firstly as people within social networks rather than individual offenders in isolation. So temporary release at Christmas (and Easter) was a key practical outworking of this understanding. Compared with today’s increasingly restrictive criteria, few crimes or length of sentence disqualified a prisoner from temporary release.
Not getting home for Christmas
Between the early 1960s and the mid-1990s, more than one in eight prisoners on average was allowed home for Christmas. This peaked in 1995 as 390 prisoners were granted temporary release; 18 per cent of the prison population. Since then, numbers have fallen, with only 107 prisoners (3%) in 2008 being granted leave.
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Disregarding the two years of Covid-19 public health restrictions, when fewer prisoners applied due to the strict isolation protocols upon return, the number of prisoners granted Christmas temporary release has remained low. Despite a rising prison population, with over 4,700 people in prison before Christmas in 2023, only 139 were permitted home. The Department of Justice explains that this trend is due to the unavailability of suitable prisoners. But, with an increase in both long-term prisoners and those in for short sentences for minor offences, most could be assessed as low-risk and continue to be released as before. So if the official account lacks credibility, what may explain the downward trend?
Prison and Society
Amnesties and temporary release reveal the values undergirding a prison system. On one hand, the decline since 1995 maps onto wider trends of more restrictive prison environments, focused on security and control rather than reintegration and rehabilitation. On the other hand, the swift decline also shows us that how prisoners are understood within society, and by policymakers, has changed. The communitarian Catholic virtues of the stable family and community traditions provided the rationale for prisoners to be temporarily released for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the serious illness of a close relative.
Prison is experienced differently for women compared to men. Female prisoners are more actively involved with their families and have more care-giving responsibilities. Yet few women are released to their families for Christmas, likely making an already painful experience even more acute. From 2016 to 2021, only five incarcerated women experienced Christmas outside of prison.
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Other dynamics may be at work here, such as ostracism and shame, but women in Limerick and Mountjoy prisons are not having the opportunity to preserve community ties and familial obligations in a season when these connections are most eagerly sought and nurtured.
The practice of offering amnesties for Christmas recognised that these were major occasions in Ireland when the entire family usually reunited—and that could include family members who were imprisoned. Within our present multicultural Ireland, other dates in religious calendars such as Eid-ul-Adha merit the same approach.
Read more: Could early releases solve Ireland's overcrowded prisons' crisis?
In the 1970s, when amnesties and temporary release were used liberally, prisoners were understood to still be members of society. Their social identities had not been diminished by careless political discourse or the criminal justice system, as they could return to their families at key moments during the sentence. Maintaining family and community ties should be understood as vital to, not only rehabilitation, but a small step towards the de-centring of the prison within Irish society.
This is an edited extract of the author's piece as published in Christmas & The Irish: A Miscellany (Wordwell) edited by Salvador Ryan
Keith Adams is Penal Policy Advocate at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin and a doctoral candidate in the Leuven Institute of Criminology.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
