Fifty years on, the Special Unit still has much to teach us

Without these stars aligning, it might never have happened. There was a distinguished civil servant, Alex Stephen, who was Controller of the Scottish Prison Service. There was a deeply humane and intelligent prison officer, Ken Murray, who was given charge of the unit. There was a patrician Tory minister, Alick Buchanan-Smith, who was bold enough to take the political gamble and face down populist attacks.

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In the end, the unit’s vulnerability lay in its dependence on such a combination of personalities, rather than being institutionally embedded. For every civil servant, prison officer or politician who admired what the Special Unit stood for, there were a few more who viewed it with suspicion, hostility or just as the threat of a good example. In the end, it was allowed to fade away after little more than a decade and has never been replicated.

A new book of essays, “Barlinnie Special Unit - Art, Punishment and Innovation” edited by Dr Kirstin Anderson, brings together a wide range of perspectives and recollections about how it evolved out of a Scottish Office working group, set up in 1970 under Alex Stephen’s chairmanship, to address the challenge of dealing with a small number of long-term, violent prisoners.

The outcome was the Barlinnie Special Unit which represented the polar opposite from what its clientele had been accustomed to. It became a shared community between staff and prisoners who were given access to education and the transformative power of art. Insofar as was possible within the constraints of a prison, they were treated as normal, equal human beings. It worked.

I have contributed a chapter to the book on how the Scottish media treated the Barlinnie Special Unit and it must be said that it was not their finest hour. The great weight of popular coverage treated it, at best, as an aberration to be viewed with suspicion and, at worst, a challenge to the deep-rooted assumption that prisons should be places of retribution rather than rehabilitation.

Yet there was one episode which pointed in another direction. Once the Unit settled down, the press were invited in to talk freely to prisoners and staff. It was a huge success and the Unit got the only day of entirely favourable publicity in its existence. The Herald’s Jim Hewitson summed it up: “The visit to the ‘murderers’ block’ has turned out to be a rather surprising, almost baffling, encounter with a bunch of ‘nice guys’.” The experiment was not repeated.

Jimmy Boyle in the Special Unit in 1974 (Image: Newsquest)

But why not, I wonder? Would it not be rather positive if prisoners were able to speak for themselves about the regime under which they live, and its effectiveness or otherwise? The deprivation of liberty need not involve the denial of free expression.

Half a century on, the story of the Special Unit tends to be told through the prism of one exceptional individual, Jimmy Boyle, and his metamorphose from Glasgow hard man, deemed by the Scottish prison system to be containable only within a cage in Inverness, to sculptor of international repute; the ultimate parable of human redemption.

Jimmy’s is an amazing personal story and there were other notable successes but it is a mistake to see the history of the Special Unit only in that high-profile context. The thinking behind it went much deeper than that and has at least as much relevance today as it did in the 1970s.

In its origins, the Special Unit was intended to be the precursor of an entirely different view of Scotland’s prisons and their purpose, which would address not only how a tiny number of exceptionally violent offenders were treated but should then cascade down through the system. That was bound to be a gradual process but in reality it has never really happened.

Scotland still sends a higher proportion of its citizens to prison than any other part of Western Europe: about 50 per cent more than the average. Eighty per cent of them are functionally illiterate and around 40 per cent re-offend (and are caught) within two years. Whatever question is being asked of our penal system, the answer lies in statistics like these which are not encouraging.

We have become so used to them that they rarely merit comment. The questions they beg are too difficult for politicians. Why has so little changed in half a century? Why are our prisons still filled to overflowing with people who cannot read, write or count? And if society fails to give so many of its children a decent start in life through the education system, what does it then expect the outcomes to be?

A Special Unit cell in 1981 (Image: Newsquest)

I am not naïve enough to believe that such a radical change of approach to penal policy would have been easy to maintain politically but neither do I accept that it should not be tried now, particularly when we have jails that are filled to overflowing. Is the answer to build more jails or to give the ones that exist a fair chance to turn round lives?

In any long-term view, the best way to empty prisons is to combat poverty and invest in the earliest years of education when life prospects and aspirations are shaped so fundamentally. That is a long haul which has to start somewhere if it is ever to progress. At present, we seem to be going nowhere, slowly.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003