Dr David Doyle, Dr Joe Garrihy and Maria Cleary at the School of Law and Criminology have recently published an article in the Current Issues in Criminal Justice Journal, entitled, ‘Foreign national prisoners and language barriers in Irish prisons’.
ABSTRACT
This article highlights the language difficulties that permeate almost all aspects of Foreign National Prisoners’ (FNPs) experience in Irish prisons and illustrates the extent to which the inability to communicate in the English language negatively impacted staff-prisoner and inter-prisoner relations, and access to information and services. Drawing on interviews conducted with 82 Foreign National Prisoners in eight Irish prisons, the article begins by outlining the methodology of the qualitative study. It then presents the research findings according to four thematic areas: relationships, isolation, provision of information, and translators and interpreters. Each section of the findings is accompanied by a discussion of several ‘promising practice' initiatives that have been implemented to assist FNPs overcome these challenges in other European prisons. The promising practice sections also make a small number of feasible recommendations that would go some way towards ameliorating the specific language barriers identified by the prisoners themselves.
Read in full here