Murray Ritchie
Why do we bang them up?

I find it difficult to believe that it is now more than 20 years since I scripted a documentary for Channel 4 on Scotland's overcrowded jails. The programme went out shortly after a much-publicised series of rooftop protests and riots in the late 1980s and the theme of the story was overcrowding.
     In those pre-devolution days the old Scottish Office permitted the Scottish Prisons Service to experiment with glasnost – remember that? – and we were quite pleased with the result which gave us unusually free access to prisons and prisoners.
     At that time our politicians were loudly proclaiming the need to reduce the prison population where the statistics were putting Scotland among those European countries most eager to deal with criminals simply by banging them up. The Scottish figures were becoming something of an international embarrassment. My recollection is that at that time we had somewhere approaching 7,000 people in jail and there was much debate about why we found it so difficult to find alternative types of punishment for petty offenders.
     Well, more than two decades on it seems little has changed, except for the worse. Our new prisons inspector, Hugh Monro, took only five minutes in the job to proclaim Cornton Vale, Scotland's only women's prison, to be in a 'state of crisis' with inmates living in unacceptable and worsening conditions. He found inadequate bedding, unsatisfactory toilets and food, and too many prisoners confined for too long to their cells. He considered the prisons system generally to be 'drifting' with no sense of purpose and he identified the ever-increasing jail population as the main cause.
     Very few countries seem to have cracked the problem of what to do with petty but persistent offenders of the kind who clutter Scotland's jails. The Americans, for example, have an appalling record. It is a sobering thought that there are two million Americans in jail, the highest prison population in the world, apparently. The UK imprisons more people than any other EU member state. According to latest estimates Scotland will have 10,000 of its people in prison within a decade. So we seem to have had more than 20 years of talk and no action while the prison population soared, something which we might be forgiven for regarding as a national disgrace.
     When I scripted that programme all those years ago I was struck by the number of prisoners in Barlinnie, which was then home to short-term offenders, who were plainly in the wrong establishment. Many of them should have been in hospital receiving treatment either for drink or drug addiction or psychological disorders. Putting them in jail was obviously pointless. But still we keep doing it. Soon it will be more expensive to pay for our jails than to fight the war in Afghanistan, according to Clive Fairweather, who was Hugh Monro's predecessor. (Like Monro, Fairweather was a soldier and he knows those things.)
     Half of those in our prisons were drunk when they committed their offences or were on drugs at the time (or both). Many if not most of the women in overcrowded Cornton Vale should not be there. Even Teresa Medhurst, who runs the place, says many prisoners have such complex problems they actually feel safer in jail than at home.
     Everyone seems to acknowledge that many of these women should be receiving help outside prison for drug dependence and other assorted social problems or doing community service. What makes the statistics in Scotland all the more shameful is the dismal fact that our prisons are bursting at the seams at the very time when our crime rates are falling, or so we are assured. The dearth of imagination in penal policy is stunning and has been so for years.
     Heaping all the blame on Kenny MacAskill, the justice secretary, seems a touch simplistic. This calamity grew in the days of Thatcher and Major when the Tories made a virtue of calling for harsh sentencing. And it continued after devolution under Labour and the Liberal Democrats. MacAskill inherited the problem and is now under fire by the opposition parties who are the very ones who allowed it to get out of control.
MacAskill's offence is to suggest we should stop jailing so many minor offenders and find alternative sanctions such as more community sentences. It seems logical to the point of being blindingly obvious. Yet the same Tories are attacking him for being a pro-criminal, anti-victim soft touch who, according to Bill Aitken, the Tory justice spokesman, would empty our jails and threaten public safety.
     As for Labour, Richard Baker seems quite clueless about what to do. He claims the 'vast majority' of those in Cornton Vale have been through community punishment and failed. The main factors affecting female prisoners, he argues, somewhat against himself, are drugs and mental health problems. He seems to argue that sending women like those to jail is pointless but we should do more of it.
     MacAskill has a hell of a challenge on his hands. Even when he follows Labour policy (in Westminster) on matters such as reducing drunkenness, and therefore, crime, and therefore the prison population, with minimum pricing, the Labour Party in Scotland opposes him. And the Tories attack him for jailing too many people when they want to jail even more.
     I don't pretend to have a magical solution. But it is evident that those countries where the gap between rich and poor is widest – the UK and US prime among them – are often those with the highest prison populations. And in the UK as we have just learned, the gap is still growing.
     MacAskill does not have the power to solve that problem and he will struggle to overcome Scotland's failing penal system. But a little more political maturity from his critics in the Scottish Parliament would be a help.