IT’S unsettling when something you’ve taken for granted all your life disappears, especially something as solid as the great perimeter wall of Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen.

Thirty-five years ago, I was a pupil at the primary school that's just down the road from the jail and I must have passed that great wall thousands of times. I was 4ft tall at the time and the wall was 100ft so it made a pretty profound impression on me as a child. It was also built in that most unfriendly of stone - granite - and various relatives would warn me that I’d end up on the other side of the wall if I didn’t behave myself. It was place I never forgot.

And now it’s gone, pulled down to make room for new houses. I watched the bulldozers do the work at the weekend and it was obvious what the symbolism was supposed to be: the Victorian prison was going but so too was the old system of justice. Thirty miles up the road, in Peterhead, a new prison has opened which is supposed to represent a break from the old methods. Except that it represents no such thing. You can pull down as many prisons as you like but if you build new ones on the same principles, nothing will ever change.

You can see the evidence in pretty much any Scottish prison. While I was in Aberdeen, I took a trip up to the Peterhead jail that shut in 2013 and it was a disturbing experience. The windows were tiny, the cells were tiny, the prospects of anyone emerging a better person were tiny. I heard one guard talk about the trauma of discovering an inmate who had committed suicide. I stood in the “silent cell” where prisoners were kept in solitary confinement. I also spoke to Jackie Stuart, the warder who was taken hostage in the 1987 riot. He told me where the prisoners had stabbed him; he told me what it was like to think you are about to die.

At Peterhead prison, all of this is presented as history but of course it isn’t – it’s still happening: suicides, riots and inhumane imprisonment. At the weekend, it was revealed that the number of prisoners who have tried to commit suicide in Scotland’s prisons has increased by over half in a year. At Polmont, the figure has risen from two to 11 in one year.

And what about the silent cell? Standing in the mouldy, grimy room, it felt like a punishment from the ancient pre-humane days, but solitary confinement is still an ordinary part of prison life. In fact, 639 prisoners have been put into solitary in the last two years and one prisoner at the new Peterhead prison was kept in solitary for 625 days.

Riots are also a continuing threat. In the 1987 riot at Peterhead in which Mr Stuart was taken hostage, the men were furious at a lack of visits and the poor conditions, but within weeks of the new Peterhead prison opening in 2014, the same thing happened. Forty inmates wrecked part of the new jail and caused £150,000 of damage. The new prison has since been rated poorly for health and wellbeing and the prisons inspector expressed concern that some prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells.

The answer is profound reform of the way justice and prisons work. The Scottish Government keeps saying it wants to do that because it knows prison doesn’t work and rates of recidivism are high. But it also knows many of its supporters are conservative on justice and want to see prisoners bashed rather than reformed, which means nothing of any significance is done. Scots men continue to shuffle down the depressing road to prison. And women - Scotland jails more woman than almost anywhere in north Europe.

Several fundamental reforms are needed. First, a radical reduction in the number of offences that attract the option of prison. Second, a presumption against sentences of less than two years. Third, a huge increase in funding for community alternatives to prison. And fourth, a system that values education rather than punishment – a report on Polmont just the other week found that its educational facilities were grossly underused, but why not have a system that reduces sentences by a day every time an inmate reads a book and by a year every time he or she earns a qualification?

Instead, all we have is the rubble of one prison and another one very much like it being built in its place. In a way, I was sad to see Craiginches being torn down in the way you always are when the architecture of your childhood changes. But what makes me much sadder is that the demolition of the prison stands for nothing - our prison system is still built on the old, discredited ways of the past.