How the SNP and Green MSPs rammed the early release of prisoners bill through parliament.
AFTER TWO DAYS’ scrutiny and a mere five working days after MSPs, civic Scotland and crime victims saw it, MSPs passed a bill which makes a permanent change to sentencing.
Now short-sentence prisoners will be automatically released after having served only 40 per cent of their sentence. This bill also ensures that when the Scottish Government wants to do the same for long-sentence prisoners, it may do so through subordinate legislation – a form of legislation far less exposed to proper scrutiny.
The offending legislation – the Scottish Government’s Prisoners (Early Release) (Scotland) Bill – will, according to many experts who rushed to submit their views in the short time available, threaten victims’ personal safety, jeopardise public safety, fail to deal with rehabilitation and reintegration, load pressure and cost onto councils, the third sector and justice organisations, all while costing the taxpayer a huge amount of money.
We know that when Assistant Chief Constable Tim Mairs warned that those being freed before serving their full sentences would “go back and start [offending] again”, he was right. Let us not forget that in an earlier panicked release of prisoners, over 40 per cent re-offended within six months. Last summer’s programme saw 1 in 8 criminals back inside after only weeks. In one case, an offender found himself back inside prison walls within a few hours.
Let’s be clear: the Scottish Government wants to suggest this is about a prison system bursting at the seams, but really it is about the SNP’s failures over 17 years.
Failure to develop a proper, holistic, strategy around the justice ecosystem; failure to build new prisons or get the staffing and resourcing right in those we have; failure to properly investigate safe alternatives to custody; failure to properly examine the prison population to ascertain whether all should be accommodated; failure to deal with a remand population which the latest report by the prisons inspector flags as a key issue.
If it were simply about relieving pressure in the short-term, there would be a sunset clause and/or a reversion provision. Yet there isn’t, despite opposition MSPs trying to include them through amendments.
Or the Scottish Government would have conceded that the moving of long-term prisoner release to Regulations (a quick process involving even less scrutiny) is deeply sinister and accepted my amendment to remove that section altogether. Yet it did not.
On that amending process, those familiar with Holyrood’s unicameral nature and its propensity to produce flawed legislation will be as concerned as I am. Despite all the examples of poor legislation over the last few years, this government was so confident that it got its drafting spot on this time, it submitted not a single amendment at stage 2. Belatedly realising it had missed something on international prisoner transfers, it brought forward an important and necessary amendment at stage 3.
This of course begged a question which MSPs should be carefully asking themselves: if the SNP missed something as obvious as that in the rush to legislate and failure to interrogate, what else might have been missed?
Another amendment concerned the “Governor’s veto”. The Cabinet Secretary, Angela Constance, stated that “public safety remains my absolute priority”, yet her MSPs were whipped to vote against amending in a protection which was so demonstrably a key aspect of keeping the public safe previously when it was used to block the release of 178 prisoners deemed an “immediate risk to specific persons or members of the public”. During the short debate it became clear the Scottish Government was voting down the amendment on the back of weak arguments around diverting resources and inability to plan properly.
The initial release will be around 390 criminals being set free early next year. Many will recall the fiasco of early release last summer which saw just 2 per cent of victims notified. During the Bill’s short process the Scottish Government responded to my challenge on this saying that victim notification is being addressed. However a response to my Written Question, in which I asked how much the new Victim Contact Centre would cost and whether this would be cannibalised from funds allocated to victim support organisations or other third sector partners, fails to give a direct answer but does say it will use resources already in the system.
In short, this government has found itself in an entirely predictable situation of its own making, following its 17 years overseeing Scottish justice. Its time in office has left our prisons under an unbearable and unmanageable strain.
However, forcing through a bill with insufficient scrutiny, hoping that by the time the prisoners are released, and long-term prisoners are being considered, people will have moved on, is, frankly, no way to make law.
Ministers failed to make their case for why it had to be this bill now, and why under this procedure.
Everything has been about getting it through, in preference to getting it right.
Neither I, nor my Scottish Conservative colleagues, would ever vote for a bill that endangers the people of Scotland, betrays victims, grabs power from parliament to the executive and fails our justice agencies, our hard-working prison staff and third sector organisations.
And all while failing to deliver any meaningful solution to the situation.
Nevertheless, despite my warnings over this reckless power grab, predictably, SNP and Green MSPs voted to protect the government rather than the public. And the bill passed.
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Photo of inside a Scottish prison courtesy of the Scottish Prison Service
