Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2015
I note David Stewart’s mention of his member’s bill on a victims commissioner and his and other members’ comments about changing what we call people. In my experience of considering the Victims and Witnesses (Scotland) Bill, we spent hours in discussions with lawyers about changing the term “victims”. I wish him the best of luck with changing the term and I will be behind him on that.
Having been a member of the Justice Committee and met many communities and community groups to discuss how the justice system is perceived by them and how it engages with them, which is the crux of the bill, I am pleased to be able to speak in this debate. It is imperative that the model that we are talking about is driven at a local level. As the minister said in his opening remarks, local leadership is vital for the delivery of the model, as is the recognition that we are talking about not just economic aspects but human beings and their lives. That is an important point to remember.
I came to this debate because I wanted to speak in it but also because, like most people here, I have a great interest in the human aspects of social justice. Like other members, I speak to young people in schools, and I will be doing that in Glasgow academy next week. I have a paper from the school on the topic of criminal justice, with a number of questions for me on particular issues. I will deal with a couple of the questions here. If the school gets a copy of the Official Report of this debate, I hope that that will make my life much easier when I go to the school next week and am asked questions.
The questions that I have picked out are about whether prison is ineffective in reforming offenders—I will talk to that; whether prison damages the most vulnerable offenders; and whether women in prison are victims and not criminals. On reducing reoffending, other members have already referred to the revolving door of reoffending and Elaine Murray referred to the economic costs of that. However, as has been said, there is also the human cost of reoffending.
There was an Audit Scotland report in 2012 on the economic costs of reoffending, and Gil Paterson referred earlier to 2009-10 figures that showed that 30 per cent of convicted offenders with mental health problems were reconvicted within a year of release. According to the Audit Scotland report, in 2010-11 9,500 people were convicted—22 per cent of the total number of convictions—who had 10 or more previous convictions; and individuals released from a custodial sentence of six months or less are reconvicted more than twice as often as those given a community payback order.
When we are considering the bill, we must remember that there are other methods out there that we can consider to ensure that people do not go through the revolving door. As Elaine Murray said, using preventative measures to stop people reoffending can save money that can be used for other aspects of the provision of community justice. I think that that is the way we all want to go, although it might take a bit longer. The bill addresses the issue of improving the provision of community justice but, as Elaine Murray said, it also addresses the issue of making the general public aware of the benefits of community justice. The general public tend not to know about that. I do not know whether that is because the media do not highlight that there are alternatives to custody, but we need to consider that aspect. If we give the bill proper consideration in that way, I think that it can achieve many things.
I also want to speak about the issue of women in prison. Dame Elish Angiolini’s evidence to the Justice Committee on that issue has been mentioned already, as well as what her commission on the issue had to say. She said to the Justice Committee that
“a very significant proportion of the women in Scotland who go to prison should not be there. Many of them—or at least a very significant percentage—serve very short sentences of imprisonment, many suffer from significant mental health difficulties and prison does nothing whatever to reduce their behaviour thereafter.”—[Official Report, Justice Committee, 1 September 2015; c 3.]
The women come out of prison but are back in a couple of weeks later because they have “hit the closest dealer”, as Dame Elish Angiolini put it, and returned to one addiction or another, which is a constant cycle that is difficult to deal with.
We need to look at the issue in the round. Having been a member of the Justice Committee and having spoken to many of its members, I think that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet on the issue, so it is a question of how we get there. We have to consider how the new community justice model can stop reoffending.
As I said, the bill’s proposals will provide not only an economic hit but a great social hit. There are women in prison who have families and children, so they are also affected. Reoffending affects many people’s lives in our society. We have to start somewhere to stop the revolving door and stop women going to prison, because sometimes they are more of a victim than a person who has perpetrated a crime.
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