Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2026 [Draft]
Our prison system is not working. Like so many other institutions, including our national health service and our schools, prisons reflect the society that they serve. That society is deeply unfair and profoundly unequal. Schools struggle to help young people to learn and thrive, as too many children arrive in the classroom hungry. Hospitals struggle to treat people with physical and mental health conditions that stem from the massive health inequalities that we still have not tackled. It is the same with our prisons.
Our prisons are beyond capacity. That is because our imprisonment rate is significantly above the European average and is even above the rates of a string of non-democratic countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. It is not because crime is out of control in Scotland. Overall levels of crime are about half what they were in 1991. However, we have left prisons, just like our schools and NHS, to pick up the pieces of failures elsewhere in society. That does not serve prisoners well, it does not serve prison staff well and it does not serve the communities that will receive those prisoners after their incarceration well at all.
As we have all accepted with the Promise, our care system is failing, and that shows up in our prisons, where about 30 per cent of prisoners have had previous experience of the care system. Nobody disputes that we have a major drugs crisis in our country, and it is no coincidence that most prisoners enter prison with drug challenges. Many prisoners will leave with a drug problem, too, prison having done little to help them.
Far too often, we take people who have already been failed by society and place them in institutions that fail them again—institutions that are increasingly unable to guarantee basic standards of welfare, dignity and human rights. Just yesterday, the Criminal Justice Committee heard that the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela rules, which lay out the bare minimum standards that are expected, are not being consistently upheld in Scottish prisons.
We have also had instances of foreign courts refusing to extradite prisoners to Scotland because basic conditions are so poor. If our prisons cannot guarantee basic standards of safety, dignity and human rights, what confidence can we possibly have that they are doing the far more demanding work of rehabilitation?
It is no surprise, then, that prisons often perform worse than alternatives when it comes to reducing reoffending and preventing future harm. Short sentences for non-violent crimes, in particular, for which there are the clearest alternatives, result in some of the highest rates of prisoners leaving prison and coming into conflict with the law again. However, 73 per cent of the custodial sentences that were received in 2023-24 were for one year or less, and sentences of three to six months have been the most common over the past decade, making up 30 per cent of all custodial sentences in 2023-24.
For those who have committed less serious crimes and are serving shorter sentences, it makes no sense at all to spend, as the motion states, £52,000 per year on prison, given that we know that, in many cases, prison will not help them to stop reoffending. We cannot build our way out of this challenge, because building more prison places does not address why our prison population is so high in the first place.
Therefore, we need to totally rethink what prisons should look like and what they are there to do. Scottish Greens believe that we need a justice system that relies far less than it does today on imprisonment and far more on prevention, restoration and rehabilitation. With greater use of effective alternatives to custody, and sentencing that follows the evidence, we will need fewer but better resourced prisons that can genuinely support rehabilitation and reintegration.
That approach is working right now in other countries. As is the case in Scotland, crime in the Netherlands has fallen over recent decades, but, unlike here, that has resulted in significant falls in the prison population. Between 2005 and 2010, there was a 44 per cent fall in the population of Dutch prisons, and the Netherlands closed 20 prisons. That is because they are making greater use of community sentencing and focusing on prevention rather than imprisonment.