Scotland’s prison system is under immense pressure – but if the latest proposal from the government is brought to fruition then it will have truly failed.
The plan to ease pressure on the overcrowded inmate population would see criminals on long-term sentences of over four years freed when they have served just two-thirds of their time.
This would mean violent offenders and rapists let out on the streets years before they should be.
With the proposal backdated to those convicted since February 2016, it would guarantee the early release of Tasmin Glass – the Angus killer jailed in 2019 for culpable homicide.
It is a proposal that would fail the victims of crime and put the public at risk, despite what the Justice Secretary says in opposition to that remark.
Because it is inarguable that the policy would result in more violent criminals in our communities and provide less of a deterrent against committing such offences.
Mismanagement on a monumental scale
The big question, of course, is how has the Scottish Government ended up in a position where freeing criminals en masse is seen as the solution?
This is not an issue that has crept up on them – overcrowding and a crumbling prison estate has been an ongoing problem for years.
It is in such a state that an Irish high court judge refused to extradite a man to Scotland on humanitarian grounds due to the prison population numbers.
And the Scottish Government is not alone, the new UK Government is considering a plan to release prisoners after just 40% of their sentence has been served.
This is mismanagement of services on a monumental scale – and it is the public who suffer the consequences.
A public who believe the government are completely out of touch when it comes to how to fix this crisis.
They don’t want to see dangerous criminals let loose early, they want to see sentences which have been decided by a judge carried out in full – otherwise what is the point of our court system?
Why put victims through horrendous trials just to let their abusers out the back door years in advance of their release date?
Other solutions must be considered
The government must find another solution to this problem, one that does not put public safety at risk.
Funding and investment in the prison estate is one obvious necessity – there is already a new HMP Glasgow and HMP Highlands in the works – but these are at least a few years away from completion.
Other options must be considered, perhaps looking at the sentencing structure of non-violent crimes, or investigating how the failures in our mental health care are contributing to the burden on our prison system.
What cannot be considered in a functioning society, is for a blanket freeing of prisoners regardless of their crime, running roughshod over our courts.
Only those on extended sentences or convicted of terrorism offences would be forced to serve their full time.
This is an issue which requires a complex solution – not the quick fix the Justice Secretary has put forward for consultation.
In the next few weeks, two notorious killers from our area, Robbie McIntosh and Tasmin Glass, will go before the parole board,
How can our communities and their victims trust that they will remain in prison when at the same time the government is pushing this agenda?
The answer is, they can’t.
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