Meeting of the Parliament 20 February 2025
My starting point is always to consider bespoke Scottish solutions to Scottish challenges. It is very important that, where we have a fully devolved matter and different systems, we do not blindly mirror solutions in other legislatures. That is why I lodged the amendment that I did: the time for the warm words that we see in the Government’s motion is long past.
If we are going to have a sentencing review, that has to start with levelling with the people of Scotland. It is quite difficult to be sent to prison these days. In 2022-23, only 13 per cent of convictions for a crime resulted in prison, which is hardly surprising when we consider the Government’s introduction in 2022 of an instruction that criminals under the age of 25 would not get prison unless
“no other sentence is appropriate”
and that any prison sentence for them would be shorter than for an older person committing that offence. The result of that was a 31 per cent reduction in the number of under-25s being given custodial sentences, including a teenager who left a fire officer with life-changing injuries but got a community payback order. In that case, if it had not been for the sentencing guidelines,
“the court would have imposed a significant custodial sentence.”
In 2019, the Government introduced a statutory presumption that a court must not pass a sentence of imprisonment for a term of 12 months or less. If a criminal got a sentence of four years or less, that used to mean automatic release at the halfway point, without restriction, supervision or consideration of the crime or the victim, regardless of whether the criminal was rehabilitated. I used the past tense there because, just this week, that timeline changed to less than half the sentence.
I thought it instructive when Lynn Burns, who is the victims expert on the Scottish Sentencing Council and whose son, Sam, was murdered in 2013, said on Tuesday that
“40 per cent of a sentence”
is insufficient time
“to rehabilitate.”
What is even more concerning in what has hitherto been an unevidenced knee-jerk policy is that, as the cabinet secretary admitted on Tuesday, the Government does not even know how many of those who are released are violent offenders. The cabinet secretary’s Tuesday interview was instructive, because she said that
“the raison d’être of the legislation is that we need to achieve a sustained reduction in the prison population.”
I would have thought that the safety of the people of Scotland should be the overriding objective. It is no wonder that a furious Linda McDonald, survivor of a brutal attack by Dundee murderer Robbie McIntosh, says in The Courier:
“I worry about public safety and believe there will be more victims.”
Indeed, Kate Wallace, from Victim Support Scotland, is surely right when she says that
“resources are taking priority over victim and public safety.”
It certainly sounds like it, when only 2 per cent of victims of prisoners released early by the SNP last summer were informed, and nothing substantive has been changed in the victim notification scheme since then. That is the real issue.
The motion has warm words, but we have heard them all before and they have never before been backed by plans, resources or holistic thinking. That is why the reconviction rate rose in 2020-21—with the CPO reconviction rate rising significantly.