The creation of a National Sentencing Council and a National Community Justice Council are amongst the 23 recommendations of the Scottish Prisons Commission, which published its report today.
The Commission’s report, called Scotland's Choice, asks ‘What should punishment in Scotland look like in twenty years time?’, and its recommendations cover six themes: rethinking punishment; prosecution and court processes; sentencing and managing sentences; community justice; prisons and resettlement; the Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act and the prison open estate.
Some of the issues covered include better targeting of imprisonment, the use of community payback and increased efficiency in the court system. There are also recommendations tackling the issues of illegal drugs in prison through, for example, the introduction of drug free wings, young offenders, improved through care for offenders on release, the use of conditional sentences and the eventual termination of the Home Detention Curfew scheme.
In its consideration of the Custodial Sentencing and Weapons (Scotland) Act, the Commission recommends that if the act is to be implemented, it should be a staged implementation reserved for those serving custodial sentences of two years or more.
The creation of both a National Sentencing Council and a National Community Justice Council is recommended to ensure consistency, enhanced public understanding and confidence in sentencing of all kinds and to drive forward change.
At the launch of today's report, the chair of the commission, Henry McLeish, said: “The work done by this Commission over the past nine months has been both detailed and demanding. It has brought us to a crossroads where Scotland must choose which future it wants for its criminal justice system.
"Our priority is keeping the public safe and at the same time, reducing the number of victims and the damage caused to communities by crime. This requires us to use the best available evidence to work harder and be smarter in challenging and changing offenders and at tackling the underlying social and cultural factors that so often drive their offending and reoffending.
"Scotland has one possible future where its prisons hold only serious offenders, prison staff regularly and expertly deliver programmes that can affect change and there is a widely used and respected system of community-based sentences.
"There is another possible future, one in which there are many more prisons, as overcrowded as those today. Dedicated and skilled professionals lack support and suffer from low morale, the public's distrust of the criminal justice system reaches record levels and fragile communities are ignored.
"We have to make a choice between these two futures. One requires us to do nothing at all; the other will require us to think differently about what we want punishment to do and to make changes in how we go about achieving this.
"In this report we propose a set of solutions aimed at moving us onto the path we should take. If this is to work, all of us – politicians, the judiciary, the media, professionals, communities, families and individuals – have to embrace this opportunity for change."
Responding to the report, Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said he welcomed the publication of 'Scotland's Choice'.
He said: “I would like to thank Mr McLeish and the members of his Commission for providing a detailed and informative report despite such a tight timetable.
“I am confident it will help us develop policies which will help end the arbitrary early release of prisoners. These will be linked to the risk posed by the individual and give communities respite from persistent, petty offending through a more coherent penal policy.
“We are committed to coming forward with detailed proposals once we have had an opportunity to consider the report over the summer.”
He added: "The situation we find ourselves in is unacceptable. Overcrowding in our prisons has reached record levels and Audit Scotland predict our prison population could increase by a fifth within the next 10 years. We cannot go on as we are, because if we do, our prisons are going to burst at the seams.
"We are making record levels of investment in the prison estate and building three new prisons - the first of which will open at Addiewell in January - but building more and more prisons at the expense of schools and hospitals is not the answer.
"The report sets out a challenging route map for Scotland's future which can only be achieved if we deliver sharper, more focused community penalties which have the confidence of the public and sentencers.
“We need a fair and equitable justice system delivering consistently robust sentences. We need to provide services which improve our arrangements for the support and resettlement of offenders, but which also meet the rights of local communities to payback for the harm caused by less serious offending.”
Councillor Harry McGuigan of CoSLA added: “We see the issue of tackling reoffending as critical to the wider goal of rebuilding and enhancing community confidence. This report offers a real opportunity jointly to deliver a change in direction, away from overuse of short prison sentences and towards focused, sharp, and robustly enforced penalties delivered in the community and making reparation to the community.
“Our shared goal should be to reduce the prison population and redirect resources to effective earlier intervention, particularly with vulnerable young people.
“We will be working closely with the Scottish Government to deliver on our shared priorities. Smarter joint working between local partners and the Scottish Prison Service will be essential to deliver change, and we see the Community Justice Authorities as playing an important role in fostering that new approach.”
Commenting on the report, Bill Aitken, the Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Justice, said: "In the SNP's soft-touch Scotland, you have to be very unlucky to end up in jail. Where the report hits the mark, it is when it recommends the blindingly obvious. Of course we should have drug free wings in jails - but we should not stop there. Of course we must do much more to rehabilitate prisoners and continue rehabilitation on release - but if the ends of justice demand more prisons are needed, then we should build them. And of course we should prosecute and sentence swiftly - but what will the sentences actually be?
“As for the suggestion of eventually phasing out Home Detention Curfews, the report actually wants to extend them to thousands more, releasing more prisoners to commit more crimes and create more needless victims. It is lamentably limp on the travesty of automatic early release, which Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP have consistently fought to keep, rejecting Scottish Conservative amendments to end it.
"As for the SNP spin about new prisons - there is only one extra being built, as two are replacements. Claims of three more are bogus, and misleading.
"When Henry McLeish accepted so enthusiastically his brief to work out how to jail fewer criminals, the alarm bells started to sound. This report confirms our worst nightmares. Prison exists for four reasons: to punish, to deter, to rehabilitate and to protect the public. Which bit of that doesn't the SNP understand?
"It thinks muggers, thieves and drug dealers should escape prison and be given community sentences; the SNP wants to ban jail terms of less than 6 months and ride roughshod over sentencing powers; it has dumbed down prosecutions so that cases are now heard in the lowest possible court and the sentences are softer and softer.
"The prime duty of government is to protect the public. The SNP is guilty of a dereliction of that duty. Scotland is not safe in the SNP's hands.”
The full report of the commission can be found here.
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