Neil Mackay's Big Read: Scotland's prisons 'shame us all'

THE nation’s two leading prison reformers are stepping down together after a combined half-century fighting to improve jails in Scotland and England.

Professor Richard Sparks and Frances Crook run the country’s leading prison reform charity, the Howard League, north and south of the Border. Both are about to retire.

Sparks, an Edinburgh University criminologist, is convener of the Howard League Scotland, and has been with the organisation for 15 years. Crook is one of

the most seasoned prison reformers in the world, and has been chief executive of the Howard League in England and Wales for 35 years.

Follow @heraldpols

Their imminent retirement provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a no-holds-barred discussion about British prisons. Neither are constrained by the need to work with Government now.

So, The Herald on Sunday sat down with Sparks and Crook to find out just what the two most influential prison reformers in Britain think about life behind bars. Both present damning accounts of the prison system and want immediate root-and-branch reform so that jail rehabilitates rather than exacerbates the crime problem.

Throughout the discussion, Sparks’s comments refer primarily to Scotland, and Crook’s to England and Wales. The pair make clear they lead “sister organisations” but the only real difference, Sparks says, is that Howard League Scotland is “tiny and extremely strapped for cash” compared to its English counterpart.

Drugs in jail

“Over lockdown, when there’s been no visitors, no families, no voluntary organisations going in, drug finds have stayed more or less the same,” Crook says, adding pointedly: “Now that’s a mysterious thing.

“Drugs haven’t been thrown over the wall because prisoners haven’t been out of their cells. So, the question has to be asked: how the bloody hell are drugs getting in, if the only way they can get in is via staff, prison officers?”

She adds that as lockdown eases there has been a “reannouncement” about “using scanners on visitors to stop drugs coming in. It doesn’t seem the right answer to the right question because scanners for visitors – it’s not going to stop staff. The main problem is prison officers.”

Sparks says he doesn’t have the same figures as Crook so cannot comment specifically on “the vector of how drugs have been getting into prisons lately”.

However, in terms of Crook’s suggestion that some staff are involved, he adds: “I’m sure Scottish prisons aren’t immune to those things – that’s a global thing. I’d be amazed if that wasn’t the case.” Prisons, Crook adds, are full of “the most vulnerable, sickest, most dispossessed, poorest, most ostracised and disliked people”. Staff, she adds, are “underpaid, under-resourced, under-managed, undereducated, pretty resentful and underskilled. It’s not a good look”.

Sparks points out that as prisons “house multiple deprived members of the population, many of whom have long histories of addiction, it’s no surprise at all that the market for drugs in prisons is very large and very embedded”.

This week, the Scottish Ambulance Service released figures showing callouts to Scottish jails for overdoses tripling in five years. The Scottish Prison Service responded saying the problem was largely down to drugs smuggled in through the mail, with letters soaked in narcotics then dried out for use.

On overdoses in jail, Sparks says: “The way we treat offenders is a barometer that tells us something about how we as a society are functioning.” Society is “dismissive” and “stigmatises” prison, he adds. “So it’s shocking and not surprising at the same time that these things continue to happen.”

Professor Richard Sparks

Sparks says society needs to think about what “custody means”, adding: “It means you’re in their care and they’ve a responsibility for your basic safety and survival.”

Crook says many prisoners take drugs to numb the experience of jail. “You want to sleep – taking drugs is a way of helping you sleep because you’re not getting out of your cell, you’re just lying down, not getting any exercise, not getting education, work or social interaction.”

Under Covid, life in prison has “been absolutely grim”, she adds. “Can you imagine what’s worse: to be locked in a cell the size of a toilet – indeed with a toilet where you have to s*** – with someone else, that’s designated for one person; or to be completely alone for day after day with nothing at all?”

Overcrowding

IN Scotland, says Sparks, “big city prisons” like Barlinnie tend to be overcrowded due to “lots of people cycling through very quickly coming straight from court”. He says: “One of the extraordinary things is how often we state the problem – how many people in the prison service, inspectors of prisons, outside observers, how many committees on the prevention of torture reports, have restated that problem – and yet it persists.”

At other jails, like Shotts or Low Moss where “people go further into their sentences … you probably wouldn’t see overcrowding in anything like the same sense”.

The irony is that the number of prisoners and prison places roughly balance in Scotland – about 7,500. “But,” says Sparks, “the places and people aren’t distributed evenly.” That means in some jails prisoners are “twoed up” – put in cells together – whereas in other jails that doesn’t happen.

England has roughly 10 times as many prisoners and places – 78,000. For Crook, the problem isn’t “overcrowding but over-sentencing. Overcrowding makes it sounds like it happens by mistake. These decisions are made by people –legislators and courts are sending too many people to prison and they’re sending them there for too long”.

She criticises the way the Government “frames the argument” with ministers saying “we’ve got overcrowding, we can build our way out of it”. That approach, says Crook, is “just expanding the system”. She adds: “You cannot build your way out of the problem because you’ll just make it worse. Every time they build more prisons, more people go in. It just compounds the problem rather than solves it.”

So, who shouldn’t be in prison? “Children, women, most remands – because the majority of people remanded won’t get a prison sentence – and short-sentence people”. Only the most violent women should be jailed, Crook believes and that would be “10 to 20 in England, hardly any”.

Crook says “19-year-olds are coming in who’ve got 40-year sentences because that’s the way sentences are going. Someone who’d have got 15 years when I started is now getting 40”.

Remand

SPARKS points out that “more than 50 per cent of people who are remanded go on to receive non-custodial penalties”, adding: “The question of remand is huge but it’s clearly possible to address.” He says if sheriffs have “other options –community-based possibilities – it doesn’t have to be like this. A big bite can be taken out of the prison population relatively quickly if you address the problem of remand”.

The impact of remand on an innocent person can be devastating. “It might only be three months out of your life,” says Sparks, “but that’s long enough to lose your flat, job, or relationships. These are the things that tie you into a law-abiding lifestyle – without them you’re in a different place.”

Crook adds: “They’re still innocent until proven guilty. They haven’t been convicted of anything. When I first started, they used to be treated so differently. They could have a third of a bottle of wine brought in every day in recognition of the fact they were innocent.”

She says “about five or 10% of people given a custodial remand are found not guilty. The majority of people sent to prison on remand are given a community sentence because the court decided the crime didn’t warrant prison – yet they’ve maybe spent months in the worse conditions we provide”.

Crook continues: “It’s a system that’s corrosive, corrupt, expensive and damaging – and, of course, because of lockdown people are spending much longer on remand as the courts haven’t been sitting. So, people who’d normally have spent two months are now spending eight or 10 months – even longer – waiting to go to court.”

Sparks adds that “it’s possibly worse in Scotland and then, of course, when you’re on remand, overwhelmingly you’re not getting access to education, you’re not doing any kind of productive work. You’re really killing time”.

Staffing

“In England,” says Crook, “they’re just recruiting anybody – they’re so desperate.” She says that while English police forces are “becoming 100% degree – you have to have education, intellectual capacity and skill – that’s not true of prison officers”.

She adds: “Because there’s such a shortage of labour, if you can work at a supermarket or drive a lorry you can earn a lot more, be more autonomous, you’re not going to have buckets of s*** thrown at you or punched because people are angry or mentally ill. There’s a huge churn of people coming in and just leaving.”

Due to Covid, Crook says, “there’s a cohort of prison officers over the last 18 months who’ve never actually dealt with prisoners. They’ve just walked the landings occasionally locking people up … They’ve simply been turnkeys”.

She suggests the job of prison officers should be on the same footing as nursing. “You cannot be a nurse unless you get a proper vocational qualification. It’s a profession. A prison officer isn’t – it’s a manual unskilled job. Yet we ask them to do really complicated, difficult things, with complicated, difficult people and they’re not qualified for it, not trained for it, not managed for it.”

In comparison, Crook points out, many other nations either had prison officers as “turnkeys” but prisons were run by “professionals like psychiatrists and teachers”, or had “prison officers properly trained and qualified”.

Sparks says that although he doesn’t “disagree” with Crook, he’s “amazed how empathetic and emotionally intelligent a lot of prison officers are, thank God. But we’ve never invested in them in the same way we have other occupations … It’s ‘people-work’ in sensitive circumstances where [prisoners] are often in crisis and extremely vulnerable. The fact that we don’t adequately support prison officers doing that work is indicative”.

Violence

“THERE’S two kinds of violence,” says Crook. “Assaults and things like that –and then state-sanctioned violence, the use of Pava spray [pepper spray]. We use physical violence to control people. We inflict additional days of imprisonment.”

“Additional days” are no longer used in Scotland and while jails are violent, says Sparks, many people would be surprised that “prisons aren’t in constant uproar because they’re not –most people want to get their heads down, do their time and go home”.

In terms of “state-sanctioned violence”, Sparks says: “The history of prisons in Scotland isn’t a pretty one in this regard. I wouldn’t paint quite as extreme a picture as Frances has done for down south, but there’s too many deaths in Scottish prisons – they’ve a number of different causes, some have arisen when prisoners have been restrained.”

Crook adds: “If prison is going to serve any purpose at all it should be the epitome of justice. It should be the state showing the way that justice and fairness should work. And yet it’s exactly the opposite.”

Rehabilitation

IN terms of education and rehabilitation, says Sparks, “lots of people are trying to do a lot of things against the current grain of the institution … there’s some heroic work that takes place but there’s an awful lot of passing time in repetitive unproductive work for which people are paid almost nothing”.

He asks: “Do we think people in prison should be doing useful work, learning skills, making contributions to their families or reparations to their victims? Or do we think they should be paid £5 a week for doing chores?”

Trade unions oppose prisoners earning regular wages which is why Sparks says “the focus should be on education and skills”.

Crook adds: “There’s been absolutely no education for 18 months – they’ve given prisoners ‘distraction packs’ –basically puzzle books”. She favours proper employment rights for prisoners so they can do real jobs, earn money and pay tax with “a third of their salary taken off for a fund for victims because they don’t have to pay for rent, light or heating”. Crook set up a similar programme but it was closed down.

She has recently spoken to large employers who – because of worker shortages – are interested in hiring prisoners. “Employment rights would be much more revolutionary than voting rights,” Crook adds.

In terms of employers asking for prisoners to be allowed to work, Sparks thinks “its likely that’s going to happen”.

Vulnerability

SCOTLAND should “take some pride” in reducing the number of young people behind bars but, asks Sparks, “why are there still some 16 and 17-year-olds in prison?”. In terms of women, there is “the sheer weight of trauma they bring to prison”.

Some women have to be sent to “mental health facilities in England rather than in Scotland for lack of adequate provision” – the alternative is often segregation.

He adds: “There’s also the hugely growing and strange phenomena of the number of very old people in prison.” Some jails have “geriatric wings” due to the number of elderly men recently incarcerated for historic child sex offences. “Glenochill has a very large number of adapted cells which are an enormous cost.” Crook adds that in England, prisons have “dying rooms”.

There is also a significant number of mentally ill prisoners. Jail has been called “the welfare institution of last resort”, Sparks says. “It’s the place where people fetch up when … other things are absent.” However, Sparks says prisoners fear being “nutted” – slang for being sent to mental hospitals.

Crook tells of one woman her legal team fought for who spent an extra “10 years” behind bars after transferring to hospital. “We couldn’t get her out,” she says. “Given the choice I’d prefer prison to a mental hospital.”

“We lock up the working class,” says Crook. “Lots of people have bad things happen to them if they’re middle class and do horrible things but poverty is the key because they don’t have advocates, they don’t have a route out of trauma … We have a class-based justice system. It’s poverty we imprison.”

Sparks agrees, noting many Scottish prisoners come from the same deprived areas. “We already know where people are coming from, what their school experiences are. Are we content for that reproduction of the prison population to just go on generation to generation?” Crook fears the “reintroduction of austerity” will only add to the problem.

The fix

CROOK has just sent an action plan for reform to the UK Government before stepping down. “Prisons have failed,” she says. “They’ve fed the crime problem, not solved it.”

Among her calls are: legal limits on prison populations; reducing prisoner numbers by half, stopping jailing the mental ill; reducing the number of ethnic minority inmates; sending young people to secure homes, not jail; closing women’s prisons and introducing residential units; curtailing remand; professionalising the job of prison officers; and introducing real work opportunities.

Sparks wants to see “Scotland coming good on its own promises”. The Government has “talked the right game for the last 10-15 years” but nothing has really changed. He points to the McLeish Commission on Scottish prisons “which confidently said there were ways to reduce the prison population by approximately half … then the prison population essentially continued to grow and stabilise at a very high level. So, the record numbers in the Scottish prison population are the years immediately after the commission”.

Reducing the prison population isn’t “utopian”, he says, “as we’ve already claimed that we’re going to do it. When people manage to hold themselves to their own principles, that’s when things change. I get frustrated when we say these wonderful things about life in Scotland – now we have to make it reality.”