Meeting of the Parliament 12 February 2026 [Draft]
I am amazed that a Government that has insufficient time to consult on non-fatal strangulation or to consider a prostitution bill deems a three-day consultation with 28 unpublished responses to be authoritative. However, that speaks to this knee-jerk, unstrategic response to a prison crisis that is of the Scottish National Party’s making.
In response to Teresa Medhurst telling the Criminal Justice Committee yesterday of the risk of a “catastrophic failure” in our prisons, this afternoon the SNP will vote through what she described as a budget allocation that falls short of what the Scottish Prison Service needs to reach the full range of the delivery agenda, to bring much-needed improvements and to ease current pressures.
Given that Martyn Evans cautioned against the mass early release of prisoners under so-called emergency schemes, which return inmates to the community without adequate support and increase the likelihood of reoffending, does the cabinet secretary acknowledge that the early release of prisoners was the wrong thing at the wrong time?
Some 800,000 hours of unpaid community sentence work remained outstanding across Scotland last year. What evidence shows that a mass influx of new criminals will improve that figure or the outcomes of such sentences?
The cabinet secretary insists that short sentences do not work, but she is reducing the time served to only 30 per cent of a sentence, which will mean more short sentences. Is that not just another example of the confused, muddled thinking that permeates the Scottish Government’s response to the prisons crisis?