Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2015
As an MSP who is not a member of the Justice Committee and is therefore not as familiar with the systems and processes that are involved in our application of criminal justice, it has always seemed to me that the sentencing of those who are convicted of crimes is an area in which greater clarity and more work to explain the system are needed.
Nowhere has that been more the case over the years than in the debates that have taken place on ending automatic early release. I had hoped that the reforms that we had been promised by the Scottish Government would help to provide clarity to do that, but my reading of the bill and the report by the Justice Committee suggest that that is not the case. In my view, the proposals in the bill do not go far enough in providing protection for our communities.
I am speaking about the bill as it is currently drafted, but we are in a rather strange position today, given that we are debating at stage 1 a bill that will be fundamentally different by the time it emerges from stage 2 consideration. Having said that, I applaud the cabinet secretary’s willingness to lodge the amendments that he has outlined today because I think that they will help to make the situation better and clearer. I am sorry that he has found himself in a position in which that has been necessary; I am sure that the problem is not of his making, but he certainly seems to be stepping up to the plate and trying to resolve it.
It seems that we are looking at only one part of the system in the bill, certainly as it is currently drafted: the end point when a prisoner is released. However, we also need to consider the point at which a prisoner is sentenced to ensure that our sentencing policy itself is correct and transparent.
The fact that the sentencing council, which was legislated for in 2010, will not begin its work until the last quarter of this year seems to me to be wrong. It would surely have been better to allow the policy proposals that are contained in the bill to be part of a comprehensive package of measures that could have been influenced by the sentencing council. I am not suggesting that there should necessarily be a delay in putting forward the provisions, but I believe that they would have benefited from consideration by a sentencing council had it been introduced prior to this point.
The Law Society of Scotland, in its briefing to members, makes the valid point that the most significant—indeed, as Margaret Mitchell highlighted, I believe that the society used the word “radical”—change to custodial sentencing policy in more than 20 years will be introduced by way of a stage 2 amendment to a bill that is already before Parliament.
The Law Society contrasts that with the situation in 1993, when significant changes were last made. At that time, as we know, the changes were made only after the careful consideration of two reports on the matter, one of which had benefited from 14 months of consideration and much discussion within the legal profession and elsewhere.