Meeting of the Parliament 23 June 2015
The core principle behind the bill is recognised across the chamber: automatic early release of prisoners does not engender confidence in our criminal justice system among the general public and must be reformed. However, that does not mean that the legislation and the Scottish Government’s overall approach to sentencing are appropriate or adequate.
It is important to note again that the Scottish Government attempted to squeeze the content of this important bill into a previous bill, but we should be grateful that it listened to the recommendation of the Justice Committee to place it in free-standing legislation.
Scottish Labour is in complete agreement with victim support groups that there needs to be clarity in sentencing. Victims, the community and offenders need to understand what the sentence that is passed by the judge or sheriff means in practice. It is not good enough that victims of crime and their families hear that someone is sentenced to X years in prison but have no idea what that means in reality. Victims and their families should be at the centre of the criminal justice system, but the current system of sentencing fails to put them there.
The bill might increase confusion about sentencing, however. As Victim Support Scotland noted in its submission,
“ending automatic early release for only some categories of prisoners would work to further complicate an already confusing system; the proposals would in fact create another rule that needs to be taken into account when calculating the release date of an offender”.
The amendment that was lodged by my colleague Elaine Murray is significant. It recognises that starting the new process with six months to go before the end of a prisoner’s sentence is a blunt instrument. Instead, as she has proposed, making it proportional is a much more reasonable approach. The amendment would have ensured that there was no uniform approach to offenders. It seems to be bizarre that an offender who is sentenced to four years’ imprisonment would be expected to be placed under supervision for the same length of time as an extremely violent or repeat offender, but that is what the bill proposes.
Scottish Labour’s amendment would have given the courts the power to set the period of supervision, rather than treating every offender the same way. A more nuanced approach would help to ensure that offenders were given a less generic rehabilitation programme, thus minimising the risk of recidivism. It would also allow a more joined-up and flexible approach to individual offenders to be introduced.
The provision in section 2 of the bill to allow prisoners who are due to be released on Fridays to be released two days earlier in order to increase the provision of support for them is a good one. It may appear to some people to be a relatively minor change, but according to the Scottish Prison Service around 4,000 prisoners are released every year on Fridays. They emerge into our communities with limited support and go straight into the weekend, a period in which many people run an increased risk of breaking the law. We currently do not do enough to help offenders back into the community once they have served their time, so that modest proposal will at least make some provision to increase the support and guidance that they receive.
However, we must look more closely at the proposals. At the heart of any structure surrounding the release of prisoners must be the calculation of risk to public safety. That is, of course, notoriously difficult to calculate, and it would be wholly unreasonable of us to expect the relevant authorities to successfully calculate the risk of reoffending every time they are called on to do so.