The IRP had no permanent jails or prisons in which to confine suspects and offenders. Despite this obvious limitation in a system of criminal justice, improvised solutions were found to detain prisoners. Some of those convicted by the Republican Courts were expelled from the area and even from the country. In one incident, three offenders who had been banished by a Republican Land Court to an island off the coast of County Clare for three weeks refused to be rescued by the RIC declaring that as citizens of the Irish Republic, the RIC had no jurisdiction over them. Abandoned buildings in isolated areas were also used for detention, as in the case of a former barracks in the Nire Valley deep in the Comeragh Mountains. A suggestion by the Chief of Police that incorrigible criminals should be flogged was turned down by his superiors as a barbarous form of punishment.