My scary question for Halloween is: why are we putting so many people in prison?
Scotland has one of the highest imprisonment rates in Europe, at 150 prisoners per 100,000 population. Only Latvia (175) and Lithuania (156) exceed us, though England and Wales are not far behind (140).
Contrast this with Norway (55), Germany (68), Ireland (91), France (115) and it’s not much wonder our prisons are over-crowded and at crisis-point. We’ve heard concerns this week over drug infestation, gang-land feuds, a lack of rehabilitation and low staff morale. The Prison Officers Association said its members’ health and wellbeing is suffering and there are real problems over recruitment and early retirement. It’s called for big increases in the prison budget.
In response the justice secretary Angela Constance announced on Monday that she is planning to release nearly a thousand prisoners early over the next few months, those serving less than four years but not including those convicted of sexual offences. Last summer there was a similar early release scheme involving some 300 prisoners.
She’s already changed the time for automatic early release from 50 per cent to 40 per cent of the sentence for most prisoners.
But still the prison population rises, and that’s despite a fall in the overall crime figures. Earlier this month it reached a record 8,430, which is 600 over-capacity. A new bigger prison is being built to replace the notorious Victorian prison at Barlinnie in Glasgow at a cost of £1bn. But the chief inspector of prisons Sara Snell has warned we cannot build our way out of over-crowded prisons. “All the jurisdictions that have tried to build their way out of over-crowding have never succeeded.”
The solution is a change in public attitudes to imprisonment and it should be led by politicians and judges. We’ve allowed ourselves to become a vengeful society, like America which has an imprisonment rate of nearly four times ours (541).
The tabloid press champions the cause of victims and we’ve become over-influenced by that. We’ve allowed victims to decide the suitable punishment for a crime, which only encourages vengeance and hatred. That’s not helpful for the victims themselves as they come to terms with their loss or injury and try to move on with their lives.
I think judges need to show more leadership. They have wide discretion over the length of sentences under the law and should not be influenced by the blood-red headlines of the right-wing press. Courts are not about satisfying victims, they are there to protect society from those who break the rules. So when it comes to sentencing, judges should consider how they can stop the criminal offending again. A fine or confiscation or court order may be enough. And if the crime is serious enough to warrant a prison sentence, then the judge needs to consider how that will stop the criminal offending again when he gets out.
There are many other non-custodial solutions the politicians and judges could use to end over-crowding and make our prisons more effective in tackling crime. For a start, 25 per cent of prisoners are on remand, innocent and awaiting trial. The court system needs to be speeded up drastically to deal with cases more efficiently. That will need more money, of course, but when you consider that it costs £47,000 a year to keep someone in prison, it would be money well spent. And why can’t more remand prisoners be electronically tagged, instead of being held in prison ?
Then there is the option of “community service” instead of imprisonment. It costs only £1,900 a year for each placement. This service could be expanded and made more rigorous. Many people are in prison because of their drug or alcohol addiction or their mental health problems. They should be required to attend clinics, rather than go to prison where their troubles are made worse.
When we’ve stopped spending money on new prisons we could use the same enthusiasm on tackling crime in the first place. That would mean more funding for the police, to break-up the drug gangs, take initiatives on knife-crime and more community policing.
Finally, I can’t believe we Scots are bad people. Crime usually has a cause – poverty , lack of worthwhile work, despair of ever getting a home – and it is largely confined to certain geographical areas, like the poor parts of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. We just need to target these zones of despair and stop breeding crime by putting more and more people in prison.
