BANGED UP

Kenneth Roy on the great
Scottish prisons scandal

Backwoodsmen of the bench

When a sheriff in Perth, responding to the overcrowding in Scotland's prisons, refused to jail a benefits claimant who defrauded the Department of Work and Pensions of £10,000, he was attacked by sections of the press for being soft on crime. The Daily Record – actually one of the more reasonable voices – said that judges should not be deterred from sending people to prison just because there are no places for them.
     The skewed logic of such a position is, however, a model of rationality compared to the public pronouncements of the chief spokesperson for the bang-em-up brigade, the Conservative MSP Bill Aitken, whose main usefulness is to serve as a reminder that, just when you thought it was safe to vote Tory, it turns out not to be. Last year, Mr Aitken told the same Daily Record that prison numbers should only be cut when there was a corresponding reduction in crime. I have news for Mr Aitken. The latest figures show that reported crime in Scotland has dropped to its lowest level for more than 25 years. Last year, 385,500 crimes were reported to the police, the first time the figure has dipped below 400,000 since the early 1980s. Yet Mr Aitken, supported by his leader Annabel Goldie and by the punishment freaks in the Scottish media, continues unrepentantly to oppose the ruling administration's attempts to cut prison numbers.
     'While crime has fallen in Scotland, we continue to lock up more offenders than ever before,' says the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill. He is entitled to call this absurd. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, our prison population was stable at around 5,000. By 2007, it had risen to a daily average of 7,376. One day this month (15 September) it reached a record high of 8,137, 11 more than the 'safe limit'. Officially, then, Scotland's prisons are not only overcrowded but dangerously so. The chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service warns of the risk of disorder and doubts whether the state of the jails is either operationally safe or compliant with legal obligations.
     This scandal, however, goes deeper than pragmatic considerations of what is safe or legally compliant. A prison as overcrowded as Barlinnie – fit for 1,018 but holding 1,764 – is no more than a warehouse. Any prospect of rehabilitation has been crushed by the sheer weight of numbers, leading inevitably to excessive periods being spent behind cell doors, degrading conditions within the cells, and lack of access to education. When I visited this prison in 2002, was given access to prisoners and staff and talked at length to the governor, the conditions were horribly grim, but not without idealism and hope. Six years later, the governor himself – a decent man – has gone public and acknowledged that his job is becoming impossible.
     God knows what Barlinnie feels like, looks like, smells like this morning. Yet the press and right-wing politicians continue to foster the grotesque myth that the inmates of such places enjoy a life of privilege denied to 'ordinary, law-abiding people' and demand, not a cut in prison numbers, but the building of more prisons, each repetition of this myth, each incantation of this demand, setting back the overwhelming case for prison reform. We are not fit to be called a civilised society.
     The mystery of the current debate over our prisons, not that it is a debate in any rational sense of the word, is why so little attention is given to the underlying cause of the crisis. To borrow from the well-intentioned but apparently ineffective Kenny MacAskill, why is it that we continue to lock up more offenders than ever before at a time when crime is falling? The answer lies on the bench with those bewigged characters known as sheriffs who preside over Scotland's lower courts. Too little is known about their background, education and culture, but it is safe to assume that most of them have no direct experience of the conditions which breed crime. Many are admirable people. Others, however, approach their mission with unseemly zeal, filling the prisons with offenders who should not be there, including young people with serious mental disorders.
     It is necessary to be blunt: the unspoken disgrace of the Scottish legal system is that some judges are full of jail lust. I have heard more than one procurator fiscal, and many solicitors, speak with despair of these backwoodsmen of the bench. Yet little is ever done about them. Why is no direction given? Why are no sanctions applied? Why are these enemies of a humane penal system not re-educated – or, in extreme cases, simply dismissed? Scotland is rotten with commissions. Let there be a commission about sentencing policies and about policing the bench.