Official Report 980KB pdf
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Professor Fergus McNeill, professor of criminology and social work at the University of Glasgow.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. I should perhaps explain that it is prisoners week in Scotland, which is why you have a reflection from a criminologist.
Many of us in this chamber have been victims of crime. A few will have sought remedy through the criminal justice system. In those circumstances, we cry out both for justice and for safety. Though nowadays we prefer that term “justice”, the Latin root of the word “revenge” is interesting. It refers to the desire to vindicate the victim, freeing them from hurt, releasing them from vengefulness and settling scores. Paying back is also supposed to liberate the offender from indebtedness.
Seventeen years ago, the Scottish Prisons Commission recommended that the default form of payback in Scotland should be community payback. Rather than relying on the pain of imprisonment to exact retribution, the commission urged us towards more constructive forms of reparation through compensation, service to communities and the hard work of rehabilitation. Yet, despite stable or falling crime rates, the prison population has grown again to record levels and we find ourselves awaiting the recommendations of a new commission.
Why, then, is the prison still our preferred apparatus of punishment? As a criminologist, I know that it cannot be because prison works because, holding other things equal, the evidence shows that imprisonment is more likely to generate reoffending than rehabilitation. In the long term, the bars and the walls do not make those of us on the outside safer and they do not improve the lives or characters of those on the inside.
I think that we persist with imprisonment for two other reasons. First, we have bought into the mythology of the prison as a magic box in which to dump and disappear social problems. Secondly, and more fundamentally, if we are honest, we are just not sure that community payback will satisfy our thirst for punishment. But here is the rub. Like most of us in this chamber, and most people in Scottish prisons, I have been a victim, I have been a witness and, yes, I have been an offender. I have also worked in criminal justice for 40 years and I have never met a person who was truly liberated by someone else’s suffering. What I have experienced is suffering people freed by connection and belonging and by repaired and reciprocated trust.
Safety and justice happen when we build bridges, not bars, between people. When Jesus was asked to condemn a sinner to suffer being stoned to death, he said:
“Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”
No one dared. Maybe the recognition that we are all sinners should also be the beginning of our investment in bridge building rather than imprisonment.
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