A view from the bridge
“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”. Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner
In July of this year, the Scottish Prisons Commission produced a report called ‘Scotland’s Choice’ which set out options for the future of prisons within the Scottish criminal justice system. It’s a bold and radical document which proposes that Scotland has two possible futures when it comes to offenders and how we deal with them.

The first possible future would see Scotland’s prisons holding fewer people than they hold now. Prisons would be utilised to hold the most serious, violent and dangerous offenders who present the greatest threat of harm. The Commission points out that keeping the public safe must be the priority and that the damage caused to victims and communities must be reduced.

This future would also see Scotland being at the forefront of widely used and well respected community-based sentences, the success of which would be measured by low reconviction rates. Just imagine, offenders who have committed offences which are deemed to be less serious would receive robust and lengthy community sentences in order to repay victims and communities instead of lying in a prison cell for two or three months with no effort made to rehabilitate them. Offenders with chaotic lifestyles brought on by drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and in the case of most female offenders, fear of abuse from pimps and/or dealers, would not be locked up without any hope but would instead be offered treatment and support to address their offending behaviour and get their lives back on track.

There is, of course, the second possible future envisaged by the Commission. This future would see Scotland continuing on the path that it’s already on. There will be many more prisons. They will be overcrowded. Prison staff will not have the time or the resources to provide rehabilitation or health-related programmes. Damaged offenders, who are a threat only to themselves and not the public, will remain damaged and will leave prison in only a slightly less damaged state than when they entered. Reconviction rates will remain high and the revolving doors in all of Scotland’s prisons will keep turning. Victims and communities will continue to suffer.

Pick up your copy of the leither to read on...

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