SNP's progress on our buckling prison system is head-bangingly slow

With no time to prepare for reintegration, prisoners have found themselves back in the communities where they offended with little support. Because of pressure on housing, some end up on the streets.

In a few English cities, this has led to tent villages springing up behind probation offices.

Unsurprisingly, such conditions raise the risk levels to communities by fostering recidivism. According to reports, of the 477 prisoners let out early in June and July, 57 of them were back in jail within weeks.

This allows critics to present the move as a risk-laden folly, although the real folly has been the incremental lengthening of sentences over the past 40 years, and a series of misguided measures such as the ending of automatic early release for long-term prisoners back in 2015.

The Prisoners (Early Release) (Scotland) Bill, passed last week, lowers the minimum term served by short-term prisoners.

Most jailed for less than four years will now be released after 40% rather than 50% of their sentence. This will not apply to those convicted of domestic abuse or sexual violence.

The new law means Holyrood won’t have to debate the need for a fresh round of early releases every time the prison service reaches breaking point.

And because it won’t be enacted until February, there will be more time for both prisoners and support services to lay the groundwork for a more positive reintegration into the community. Such work can be expensive.

Barlinnie Prison

£35k annual cost

Last week, the Express newspaper whipped itself up into a frenzy over an estimated £1.5 million to £2m in “one-off implementation costs”, but it costs £35,293 to keep one prisoner in jail for a year, so the costs of continued incarceration are also mind-boggling. That’s before you take into account the societal cost of jails so over-capacity that prisoners are left to fester.

The new law should act as a safety valve, taking some heat from the current powder-keg conditions. But its potential impact should not be overstated.

According to the Scottish Government’s own calculations, it will lead to the release in February of between 260 and 390 prisoners out of a population of around 8,250, bringing the total to (at best) 7,850 – 157 below the service’s target capacity.

But the figures are likely to rise again as more offenders make their way through the courts.

To give some idea of the scale of the problem, let’s look at Barlinnie where there are 1,400 prisoners and just 500 jobs. That’s 900 men in a crumbling Victorian jail, locked in cells they may share with another prisoner for most of the day. What would you expect in those circumstances but volatility?

According to criminologists, the roots of the overcrowding lie not so much with those on short-term sentences, but with the high number of remand prisoners, the gradual lengthening of long-term sentences, and the”scandalously” high levels of recall for prisoners who are out on licence.

To its credit, the Scottish Government did introduce the Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Act 2023, which is meant to ensure sheriffs remand only when there is a risk to public safety. And the use of electronic bail – which allows offenders to be tagged and monitored – is slowly rising.

Yet the numbers on remand have remained stubbornly high at around 2,000 (2,300 in March), or a quarter of the prison population. This is due not only to sheriffs erring on the side of caution, but to the tendency to favour remand if court appearances have been missed, and to the backlog in trials which means those on remand are waiting much longer for their cases to be heard.

The rate of recall for parolees has risen sharply, while the processing of those recalls has slowed.

Delay for lifers

SOURCES within the system tell me lifers who have been reincarcerated are waiting years for the parole board to access paperwork in relation to their alleged breach of licence in order to make a decision on their futures.

But the hardest nettle for the government to grasp is the inflation of long-term sentences. This is because any move to shorten them produces sensationalist headlines.

The same Express piece went on: “Worryingly, the Bill also proposes giving ministers new powers to order the early automatic release of long-term prisoners [that’s the policy the SNP scrapped in 2015] serving more than four years,” thus highlighting both the party’s tentative move towards a less punitive approach, and the challenge of following through with the 2026 Holyrood election looming.

And yet, away from the tabloids, the issue of overcrowding does seem to be capturing public attention.

Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment of reformer James Timpson as Prisons Minister was widely applauded, there has been a spate of hard-hitting prison documentaries north and south or the Border, and informed discussions of early releases and other prison-related issues are becoming a regular feature of news programmes and call-in shows.

There seems to be a growing weariness with a circular debate, which never solves anything: a sense that we have to move on from the same old arguments and look at the way other countries, including Ireland and the Netherlands, have embraced more community-based approaches, despite, in the Netherlands’ case, having the far-right Freedom Party’s retrogressive rabble-rousing to contend with.

“Over the last 40 years, we have decided that people who commit more serious crimes need much longer punishment and there has been no formal articulation of why we think that or what we expect it to achieve – why we think 30 years will do something 20 years doesn’t – and no reckoning of the consequences of passing extremely long sentences which mean people are written off and contained for decades before the system tries to do anything meaningfully rehabilitative,” Fergus McNeill, professor of criminology and social work at the University of Glasgow, told me at a recent prisons-related event.

“Then, when it does get around to it, the damage has been done in terms of institutionalisation, and the reintegrative challenges are so much greater.”

This is what makes the piecemeal nature of the Scottish Government’s fixes so frustrating. Ditto the lack of innovative proposals from Labour and the Tories which might push the SNP to raise its game, and encourage it to take speedier action.

Because, for all the SNP’s pledges, progress remains head-bangingly slow and important developments tend to fall by the wayside. For example, although the chief inspector of prisons Wendy Sinclair-Gieben stepped down at the end of her term in August, no permanent replacement has yet been appointed.

System buckling

MEANWHILE, the sentencing and penal policy review the Scottish Government announced in February still hasn’t been established, provoking concerns that it will not now be able to report back before the next election by which time another party may be in power.

But the system – and the individuals it contains – cannot wait until then for change. It is buckling now. The only way to improve things is to move towards a more community-based approach.

Politicians know this. They have to change the narrative and to bring the public along with them. It’s a daunting task – but the public may be more ready to embrace it than they imagine.