Meeting of the Parliament 23 June 2015
No, thank you.
Roderick Campbell criticised Elaine Murray, saying that there was no evidence for her amendment. That was echoed by Christine Grahame, who said that the Justice Committee did not take evidence on Elaine Murray’s amendment at stage 2.
Let us consider the comments from the Law Society of Scotland. The Government’s stage 2 amendments brought in one of the most fundamental changes to sentencing that we have seen. The Law Society said:
“We are concerned that such a sweeping amendment was agreed without any collation of supporting evidence or research, and in our view full opportunity was not given for proper scrutiny of the amended section 1 in any significant detail.”
Others, too, expressed concerns about
“the lack of evidence in support for the need to end automatic early release for all long term prisoners.”
That is a separate debate, however.
We cannot criticise Elaine Murray for not providing evidence for her amendment and yet say that we are happy to accept a fundamental change from the Scottish Government without evidence, without consultation and without adequate discussion. Again, we have got it wrong.
As I said earlier, it is imperative to have clarity. As Elaine Murray and others have said, we believe that a prison sentence should mean what it says and that a prisoner should be in prison for at least as long as a judge orders. That is the point that Elaine Murray has been trying to make. We believe that we should give our judges the ability to determine the sentence, and the ability to determine the required supervision that the prisoner will have to undergo at the end of their sentence.
We all accept that reintegration into society after a long period in prison is not straightforward. Indeed, the Law Society makes a valid point:
“In the absence of supervision, we are concerned that offenders may leave prison after many years in secure conditions with no, or at best minimal, opportunity to access properly funded support within the community.”
That is one problem with what the Government is putting forward, because there is no structure or indication of what supervision and support will be provided. Frankly, this is a missed opportunity, which is a shame because the public expect us to do something effective. The Government got it wrong; it went about this the wrong way and Parliament should have taken the opportunity to do things properly, because that is what victims and the public deserve.
16:21