Meeting of the Parliament 23 June 2015
I pay tribute to the Justice Committee clerks for their hard work and to the witnesses who provided such vital and insightful evidence at stage 1 and stage 2 of the bill.
The bill is in two halves. Section 2 provides the Scottish Prison Service with the power to release prisoners up to two days early to facilitate community reintegration. That is a sensible proposal that will create the flexibility required to help provide access to adequate support services at a critical juncture for the offender.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of section 1, which deals with the automatic early release of prisoners. In its 2007 and 2011 manifestos, the Scottish National Party made commitments to end automatic early release. Six years after 2007, it lodged an amendment to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill that pledged to end automatic early release for less than 1 per cent of prisoners. It then presented the same proposals in separate legislation to end automatic early release for sex offenders who have received custodial sentences of four years or more and other serious offenders who have received sentences of 10 years or more.
As numerous witnesses pointed out, there was little logic to those proposals, given the low-level recidivism rates for those categories of prisoner. The new cabinet secretary therefore lodged amendments at stage 2 to extend the bill’s provisions to all long-term prisoners with determinate sentences of four years or more. However, even with those changes, the bill now covers just 3 per cent of prisoners.
Despite the cabinet secretary’s efforts at stage 2 to justify the bill, witnesses and stakeholders maintain that section 1 is not fit for purpose. There has been absolutely no attempt to carry out the necessary meaningful scrutiny of and debate on the provisions, which the Law Society of Scotland described as possibly
“the most radical change in custodial sentencing policy for twenty-two years”.