Meeting of the Parliament 20 February 2025
The Scottish Conservatives have been demanding a review of sentencing and penal policy for years. I am pleased to hear that progress has finally been made and we look forward to contributing positively to that, but the cabinet secretary announced almost a year ago to the day that she planned
“to commence an externally led review of sentencing and penal policy.”—[Official Report, 27 February 2024; c 13.]
In the meantime, rather than getting going with the urgency that is required, we have seen a series of panic-stricken knee-jerk reactions to the crisis of the prison population. Responsibility for that lies entirely at the feet of the Scottish National Party Government, which has been in charge of Scotland’s justice system for 18 years. That is 18 years without the Government having developed a holistic, coherent strategy to understand why the prison population is so high and propose whole-systems approaches to address it. It is 18 years of the Government introducing admittedly extremely important legislation to address appalling crimes such as historical sexual offences and domestic violence but failing to adequately prepare for and provision the wholly predictable resultant increase in prisoners.
It is 18 years of failure to replace and increase capacity in an antiquated prison estate, which is consequently incapable of providing the rehabilitation opportunities required to break the cycle of reoffending that the cabinet secretary rightly talked about.