Why Scotland must stop sending more people to prison than most of Western Europe

This is the subject of my latest Scotsman column, published in today's newspaper (17th September 2024).

Pressure on Scotland’s prison system may be a blessing in disguise as we may finally be forced to design a better future for offenders, says former police officer Tom Wood

Necessity is the mother of invention, goes the old proverb, and if true perhaps the recent necessity to relieve pressure on our prison system by releasing inmates early will finally force us to confront some inconvenient truths about our prisons.

We now imprison more people than ever, our prison population having grown steadily over the last decade. Scotland imprisons more of our people per capita than most other countries in Western Europe. Additionally, after decades of underfunding, prisons, police stations, and hospitals have been degraded to the extent that many are falling apart.

We know that our prisoners are mainly young men serving short sentences and we know that many are functionally illiterate, and suffer from poor mental health. Given the prevalence of drugs in our prisons, if they don’t go in with a drug problem, they will almost certainly come out with one.

Scotland is sending too many people to prison because politicians lack the courage to back alternative sentences (Picture: Paul Faith) | PA

Jail cell ‘better than home’

We must also face the fact that, for some, prison is not the deterrent it is for most of us. As a young policeman, I quickly learned that, for many of my clients, the threat of prison was worse than the reality.

I well remember speaking to a young man, a member of an active criminal family, who had just come out after serving his first six months’ sentence in an adult prison. “It’s no bother,“ he told me, “a clean bed and three square meals a day – it’s better than home. Some of my pals are there, and a snooker table, what’s not to like?”

Bravado, of course, but behind it a bleak truth. Some of our prisoners lead such desperately chaotic lives that jail holds few fears. The evidence for this is clear: high reoffending rates indicate there is little deterrence. Short sentences, those of less than six months, offer no real opportunity for meaningful rehabilitation, and at £50,000 a year per person, prison is not a cheap option either.

Expensive and failing

So, our crumbling, full-to-bursting prisons punish some and keep the violent off the streets, but fail to rehabilitate most. They are expensive and many come out worse than they went in.

This is not a revelation, we have known all this for years. So why, you may ask, are we still seemingly hellbent on the support of a system that we know, for the most part, does not work?

The answer is a familiar one. We do not have the courage to turn away from the prison model because many of the general public see it as the only real punishment. Consequently we have never invested consistently enough in the alternatives to prison now adopted by most of our European neighbours.

A chance to change

But perhaps this latest breakdown in our prison system can give us the opportunity for fresh thinking. We should carefully monitor those prisoners released early to see if their offending rates are higher than those who complete their sentences. If not, that would suggest the length of sentence does nothing to deter reoffending.

This could galvanise us to finally change course and invest seriously in alternatives to prison. We cannot keep locking up so many of our young people and doing them more harm than good.

With an ageing population and falling birth rates, our young people are a scarce resource.