Dame Elish Angiolini has a habit of paying strict attention to detail and she’s clearly not let that slip two years on from departing the highest law officer post in the Scottish legal system. Ahead of our interview on her decade in office, first as Solicitor General then as Lord Advocate, I ask if she is comfortable with a recorder running while we talk. It is not a problem, the now principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford responds, because she intends to use one herself. To the casual observer, the girl from Govan is not prone to switching off . Chair of the recently-reported Commission on Women Offenders and head of an ongoing investigation into the Mortonhall baby ashes scandal, Dame Elish may have swapped a congested Chambers Street, Edinburgh for the much more picturesque setting...

Mike Ewart, chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), 2007-09, still remembers the call in 2008. “I was going into a Howard League lecture at which Henry McLeish [chair of the Scottish Prisons Commission] was speaking and got a phone call to say there is no water going into Barlinnie – the mains are fractured somewhere inside the perimeter,” he tells Holyrood. “Now we have in place emergency arrangements to ship in bottled water so there would be drinking water. For a limited period, you can manage without water to fl ush the drains, only for a limited period for obvious reasons, and you can run for a limited period, but only for a limited period, without being able to operate the kitchens – you can bring in packaged cold food. But in Barlinnie, the only system for...

An ability to challenge the provision of special measures for vulnerable victims and witnesses in court under the forthcoming Victims and Witnesses Bill risks winding back the clock ten years, victims’ groups will warn this week. The Victims Organisation Collaboration Forum Scotland, which counts Victim Support Scotland (VSS), Rape Crisis Scotland and Children 1st among its members, will write to members of the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee in a move that coincides with this week’s Stage 1 debate on the legislation. A small number of agencies unable to attend the forum last week were being consulted at the time of writing, though it has been agreed to send a letter suggesting progress made under the Vulnerable Witnesses (Scotland) Act 2004 will eff ectively be cancelled...

The UK Government has been urged to replicate a pioneering Scottish-based scheme helping navigate unaccompanied young people through the asylum system. Th e Scottish Guardianship Service, which is delivered in a partnership between Aberlour and the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC), provides youngsters who have been separated from their parents with a guardian to assist in dealing with lawyers, Home Office officials and social workers as well as helping build social networks. Th e service – the first of its kind in the UK – has garnered government funding for a further three years after a 30-month pilot drew to a close earlier this year and was the subject of a Scottish Government debate last week. Ahead of Refugee Week getting under way this week, SRC chief executive, John Wilkes, told...

Scandinavia is often said to showcase the gold standard within criminal justice. There is something telling, then, about a comparison between Scotland and Sweden on electronic monitoring (EM). At an operational level, the two clearly differ in the way EM is administered – Sweden delivers the service in-house via its prison and probation service, while Scotland has, since 2002, opted for a private sector provider. Differences, however, are not limited to this clear – and, it’s fair to say, often contentious – distinction. Sweden, home to the longest-running national scheme in Europe, has sought to strengthen engagement with the technology since piloting a front-door scheme as an alternative to custodial sentences of up to two months in 1994. That threshold reached three months by...