Meeting of the Parliament 20 February 2025
I welcome the information that the cabinet secretary has shared with us about the commission that will be chaired by Martyn Evans. I look forward to receiving regular updates on the work of that body.
Research published in the medical journal The Lancet this month puts this debate into context. More than 11.5 million people across the world are incarcerated, and that number is rising; indeed, it increased by around a third of a million from 2023 to 2024 alone. At least one in seven of those people has a severe mental illness, and very many are in poor physical health.
Behind those figures lie two stark realities. The first is that whether or not someone is incarcerated depends not so much on the harm that they have caused but on who they are, what their childhood was like, where they live and what illnesses they live with. Between a half and three quarters of people charged in court have mental illness, compared to around one fifth of the general population.
The second reality is that, for most people, prison makes their mental health worse. Prison is not a safe place, and it does not make the world outside prison safer either—not for survivors of violence, not for wider communities and not for people who have been incarcerated, who are at serious risk of avoidable death in their very first week after release.
The motion highlights that Scotland is part of the problem, but it also reflects the fact that most of us want to be part of the answer, too. Against a backdrop of brutality from Washington—and, tragically, from Westminster—Scotland wants to be different, and we in the Scottish Greens are ready to work to make that difference happen.
That means having a radical ethics of care and compassion. It means recognising that genuine security is about wellbeing rather than control. It means giving restorative and community justice a chance to work and giving survivors well-founded confidence that, when properly implemented, non-custodial sentences will keep them safe. It means giving individual attention to people who need support, whether it be in primary prevention, in the community or in prison. It means managing cases swiftly and efficiently, making the necessary connections between civil and criminal cases. It means legal aid that works for all those who need it, including in relation to child contact.
It also means recognising and rewarding the difficult and vital work done by all those in the justice sector, including the third sector, with its invaluable expertise; the forensic specialists at the University of Dundee’s Leverhulme research centre, which, shockingly, senior management plans to close; our increasingly overstretched prison officers; and the staff, whose pressures have been described so vividly in the Public and Commercial Services Union’s recent “Rough Justice” report.
I do not underestimate how difficult any of that will be. However, that is why the independent review is needed: to find out exactly what is happening, why so many people are still being sent to prison, what needs to change and how that can happen. It needs more than that, though. It needs resources—of funding, of course, but also of political and public will.
As we know, poverty and adverse childhood experiences make people vulnerable to involvement in crime—as victims, as survivors and as those convicted—yet we still see traumatised children being described in utterly dehumanising language by irresponsible media and political figures. I hope that this debate will be free from that kind of contempt. I hope that we can find consensus on positive ways of making Scotland a safer, more just and more compassionate place, and I look forward to hearing, and talking later, about some of the transformational pieces of work that are already happening, that need support and which must continue.
15:44