Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2015
This stage 1 debate on the Prisoners (Control of Release) (Scotland) Bill is an important one. I thank the clerks, the convener and my fellow members of the Justice Committee for all their hard work, and I pay tribute to all the witnesses, who gave such invaluable evidence.
The bill has two main sections. Section 2 seeks to provide the Scottish Prison Service with the power to release prisoners up to two days early in order to facilitate community reintegration. That is a sensible provision that seeks to create the flexibility to ensure that appropriate throughcare, including housing and so on, is in place for prisoners on their release in an effort to deal with some of the problems that we know lead to reoffending after release.
I turn to section 1. Although I sympathise with the predicament that the new cabinet secretary has inherited, that does not alter the fact that the bill as drafted—and the proposed stage 2 amendments—is nothing short of a dog’s breakfast.
The aim of the bill is to reduce reoffending and increase public safety. That was the supposed rationale behind targeting the provision at offenders who had received sentences of more than 10 years and sex offenders who were serving sentences of four years or more. However, as witnesses pointed out, there is no logic in targeting that particular group because evidence shows that sex offenders have the lowest reoffending rates of all categories of prisoner.
In addition, the bill would apply to less than 1 per cent of offenders in Scotland. The cabinet secretary clearly recognised that the original proposals fall well short of the mark, so the Scottish Conservatives welcomed the improvement that the cabinet secretary announced when he indicated that he intends to extend abolition of automatic early release to all prisoners who are serving long-term sentences of four years of more. That means that at least we have moved from the bill covering 1 per cent of prisoners to its covering 3 per cent of them, but that does not alter the fact that 97 per cent of prisoners will still automatically be released early. As the cabinet secretary said in evidence to the committee,
“It is worth keeping in mind that we are talking about a very small number of prisoners and that it will be several years into the future before any of this will start to have an impact.”—[Official Report, Justice Committee, 3 March 2015; c 47.]
It is therefore a real concern that, as the Law Society of Scotland stated,
“the most radical change in custodial sentencing policy for twenty-two years is to be introduced by way of a government amendment”.