Mark Smith: The Irish are calling us inhumane. They’re right

The other problem here is that the word-association game works in reverse as well. Barlinnie, Bar-L, is a Victorian prison still run, in some ways, on Victorian principles and it’s notoriously over-crowded and unreformed, from the grim “dog boxes” where new inmates are processed to “the feeding” at 5pm; as the daughter of one inmate said to me: “If you treat people like animals, they’re going to act like animals”. It also means that, if you keep the name Barlinnie, all that grim historical resonance – the collective memory of inmates that have gone before – will cling to the new prison. It wouldn’t be a great start.

So my solution would be a completely new name, something unconnected to any specific geography, but once we’ve sorted that, perhaps the authorities could sit down and work on the real problem: how our prisons are actually working and the bad reputation we’re getting round the world. An Irish court has just refused to extradite a man to Scotland on humanitarian grounds. The judge said that if the man, 24-year-old Richard Sharples, was sent to a Scottish prison, he would face a substantial risk of inhumane or degrading treatment.

That’s pretty shocking stuff isn’t it? A judge in one of our European neighbours thinks our prisons are so bad that sending someone there would be inhumane. It’s also worth noting that when a psychiatrist working with the man, who has number of mental conditions, sought assurances about his treatment, the Scottish Government did not give them. What is that? Indifference? Arrogance? Or just a cynical awareness that, beneath the apparently easy-going exterior, there is a deep, dark streak of conservatism in Scotland, particularly on justice.

In some ways, Barlinnie 2, or HMP Glasgow, may represent a little bit of hope that change is coming. Finally, the Victorian jail will be a thing of the past and there’ll be a new building designed round big open communal spaces. There’s also talk of the inmates having landlines and screens in their cells so they can more easily take part in training and education and keep in touch with their friends and family and that’s an absolutely crucial change: prisons should never, must never, cut you off from people who can help you.

But I must say, in almost every other way, I’m not hopeful we’re really moving forward, mainly because we’re not addressing the underlying issues. An academic who researches prisons put it to me this way: no change to Barlinnie’s physical infrastructure will overcome the problems of a large prison population. We’re supposed to have a presumption against short sentences in Scotland and yet a large part of the Barlinnie population is still in for months rather than years. A quarter of them are also on remand – in other words, one in four are untried and unconvicted – all of which contributes to the horrendous overcrowding. Should we be surprised when a judge thinks this is unacceptable?

Perhaps the new Barlinnie will fix some of the problem, but until we curb our instinct for incarceration, I doubt it. A community worker with decades of experience of working in prisons told me it was like a dark version of Field of Dreams: build it and they will fill it. If a prison is for 800, he said, in three months it’ll be full and if the capacity is 1,200, it’ll be the same, and so on. The worry with that is the new Barlinnie will start out with good intentions and might be fine for a while, but in the long run it will end up exactly the same. Packed. Overcrowded. Inhuman.

I would have thought the potential solution here is obvious because some of our European neighbours, such as Finland, are doing it already. Finland is quite a good example actually because its population is similar to ours and it also has its problems with drink and drugs. But the point is it has about half the prison population Scotland has and that’s because its justice system is built on the idea that prison should only be for people who represent a risk to the public. It also has one agency which works with inmates in and out of prison and it treats drink and drugs as a public health issue rather than one for prisons.

I’d like to think the Scottish Government gets some of this. For example, it says it wants to follow the Finnish example and treat drugs as a public health issue and yet over and over again addicts are sent to prison without consistent help. There’s also good work being done in some areas: I visited Polmont last year with the SNP's deputy leader Keith Brown and heard about the scheme to keep prisoners better informed about what’s happening to them in the system; to give them some agency and help them feel a little less isolated. Good stuff as far as it goes.

But underneath it all, I’m worried. The man at the centre of the Irish case is accused of serious offences – it’s alleged he hit a man in Glasgow with a brick, repeatedly punched and kicked him and stamped on his head – and if found to be true in a court, serious offences must attract serious consequences. But the man also has mental conditions and has never lived independently and yet the judge said the Scottish authorities had made no real attempt to engage with the accused’s needs. To me, that means the judge must be right: the current state of the Scottish prison system is so bad that the men and women within it face a substantial risk of inhumane or degrading treatment.

So do things differently. For a start, we could – as was recommended as far back as the 90s, after the Strangeways riots – build smaller prisons rather than huge ones. We could also resist the knee-jerk reaction, buried deep in the prosecution service, in the police, and in the public, that prison keys are the answer. But above all we could change the mindset that because prisons are a necessary evil, they have to be grim, nasty, and overcrowded. In the end, I don’t much care what they call the replacement Barlinnie. But I do care about making it different.