Hansard

I begin as I do in almost all the speeches that I make in the chamber by praising the Government for the things that it is doing right, in particular the courageous decision by the new Cabinet Secretary for Justice to cancel the proposed prison. I was faced with exactly the same situation when I became a minister. The SPS was proposing three or four new private prisons, and I had to say to the First Minister, Jack McConnell, that I could not accept that. We changed it to one new private prison, Addiewell, and one public sector delivery, which eventually transpired under Kenny MacAskill at Low Moss.

The Scandinavian model, which we often talk about in the chamber, is one of very much smaller prisons generally. The average size of our 15 prisons in Scotland is 495 prisoners. That is far too large. I have worked in a prison, and I know what the situation is. I will come back to that.

I praise the Government for the Angiolini commission, whose work has been excellent and has been referred to by many members in the debate, and for attempting, through the McLeish commission, to address the issue of sentencing. We need to return to that with the Scottish sentencing council.

I also praise the tone of the new cabinet secretary’s approach to his portfolio, in particular his express desire to work with all parties to achieve the right approach. Gil Paterson is right to say that we need a truce on this issue and a commonality in our approach.

We need to find a way forward for women offenders. The issue is not new and I will deal with some of the history, particularly since the mid-1980s, and then I will speak about the new approach.

I had the privilege of working in a deputising medical capacity in Cornton Vale prison from the day it opened in 1976 until I was elected to Parliament. During those 23 years, I witnessed a number of significant changes, but they were insufficiently radical to address the underlying issue. As a country, as every speaker has said, we imprison far too many women who are not violent or a threat to the public or themselves, and who have health and social problems.

The SPS responded positively to many of the challenges that it was faced with. It dealt with suicides in Cornton Vale by introducing the Samaritans and then the listener services along with a new protocol called act to care. Members should note that that reduced the number of suicides in Scottish prisons generally to well below the level in England.

The big change that took place between 1987 and when I became a minister in 2001 was in the number of those who presented with a history of drug use. That figure was 10 people in 1987. By 2001, it had reached well over 80 per cent of the prison population. In the early days of the Parliament, Labour also recognised that there was a significant and growing problem with alcohol in the general population and we brought in the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005.

Iain Gray established the MacLean commission and I was the minister who took it over. That produced some radical proposals, one of which was that women offenders whose offence was related to drugs should not receive short-term sentences. Instead, they should be sent to what the commission called the time-out centre, which many members have referred to as the 218 Bath Street centre. That centre diverts 500 women a year from short-term custody—a not insignificant number of receptions—but it does not have a big effect on the daily prison population.

The time-out centre had a slightly rocky start and it took until 2006 to prove its worth. However, it is my regret that neither the Labour Government in our last year nor the present Government replicated the project in the following years. Too often we conduct good pilots for demonstrably effective projects but we do not follow them up; we go for more pilots. The project should be replicated now in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen and there should be a similar pilot for male offenders.

Moreover, such centres should be not just for those offenders who have a drug problem but for those who have an alcohol problem. Alcohol has again become an even more significant factor, although for a while it was much less. The figures from the 2013 prisoners survey are stark. They show that 55 per cent of prisoners reported committing an offence while they were using drugs, and 50 per cent said that they were intoxicated at the time of the offence. That was up from 42 per cent in the 2011 survey.

Does prison help? If it does, let us continue using it. However, 9 per cent of women offenders started to use drugs when they were in prison, 42 per cent used drugs while they were in prison and only 12 per cent reduced their drug use. The system is ineffective and a waste of our money. It has to change.

On alcohol, the SPS uses the World Health Organization recommended screening tool, the alcohol use disorders identification test—AUDIT—but only 30 per cent of women offenders reported having been assessed, and only 20 per cent said that they had received any form of treatment. That is wholly inadequate.

Labour evaluated and rolled out drug treatment and testing orders. We opened pilot drug courts in Glasgow and Fife. We piloted tagging on remand, which should now be revisited more strongly. We worked with SACRO to increase bail supervision and that has subsequently been reduced. We introduced restorative justice, which has not been followed through. We ensured that women would keep their infants in prison with them, which is very important for early attachment. We ensured that Open Secret worked in Cornton Vale with the significant numbers of survivors of sexual abuse that Dobash and Dobash reported; almost 70 per cent might have been either abused through their childhood or subjected to domestic abuse.

We worked hard to reduce further the number of women who were sentenced for fine default and that has been successful. There were around 600 such women when I was the minister and the figure fell to 84 by 2008. Again, that does not affect the daily population, but it does affect receptions.

The problem is that receptions show the biggest churn. They have doubled. Sheriffs are sending women to prison because they feel that they have no alternative. We have to do better and we have to do it now.