Meeting of the Parliament 25 June 2026 [Draft]
I am responding to an intervention.
We should be building a justice system that is focused on harm prevention, safety and accountability rather than on punishment. For me, that still means a system in which people who pose a violent threat to communities are removed for our safety, but that system can and should look very different from our current, broken prison system.
In too many cases, our prisons house people who are already experiencing vulnerabilities such as poverty and substance misuse. Janey Starling from Level Up, which is a feminist organisation that campaigns for an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers, has described prisons as
“just warehouses for people who have fallen through all of the holes in our welfare safety net.”
The evidence that we have proves her point. Sixty-three per cent of people in prison have an alcohol use disorder. Almost half of people arriving to prisons in 2024-25 were from the 20 per cent most deprived areas of Scotland. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 70 per cent of women prisoners in Scotland report that they have been a victim of domestic abuse or violence from their partner.
I thank Carol Mochan for bringing up women in prison. Women are also far more likely to be imprisoned for shoplifting than men. Vast inequalities are reflected in the system. If people go into prison vulnerable, they are likely to come out the other side with those vulnerabilities multiplied. UK-wide statistics suggest that, if someone goes into prison with a substance misuse problem, they are seven times more likely to experience an overdose when they come out. If someone goes into prison experiencing housing insecurity, they are far more likely to become homeless again on their release, and they are likely to have lost the community support networks that they had before entering prison. That is why the Greens have called for all prison leavers to go into housing first on discharge, with safe accommodation packaged together with appropriate support, making sure that everyone has access to—