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By Rory Cahill
Overcrowding at Glasgow’s Barlinnie jail is so severe that the original 19th century designers of the institution would be shocked at the conditions, Governor Bill McKinlay has said.

Speaking exclusively to Holyrood, McKinlay said that the overcrowding – which has seen 1,764 inmates squeezed into accommodation designed for 1,085 – was harming the chances of offenders being rehabilitated.

He said: “The prison was first opened in 1882 and the residential section was completed in 1892 and the purpose then if you look back, was to deal with overcrowding. So the Victorians decided to build a large prison to give people humane conditions, one cell each, to deal with the overcrowding problem they had.

“We are now significantly further on and I think they would be appalled to learn that what they had built for single cell accommodation we have two prisoners in. It is not acceptable to have two prisoners in a cell designed for one. Having said that, it meets the requirement because the Victorians had the foresight to build them large enough to hold two prisoners. But they’d say, ‘We closed Duke Street and the Borough to build something better, and now we’re worse off than we were then.’

He added: “Staff need to engage with prisoners and need time to engage with prisoners to be effective. People say we are not effective but if we’re not effective just now, think what it would be like if there was no or little contact and some of these programmes were not going on to attempt to reduce reoffending which, in turn, reduces the number of victims.”

During a visit to Barlinnie, Holyrood witnessed first hand the causes and effects of overcrowding, including a disabled man being held for nine days for possession of nail scissors, and two trained addiction nurses spending six and a half hours a day simply dispensing methadone to inmates.

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