Isobel Lindsay | ukwatch.net

Ignoring the McLeish report would be a real crime

Alex Doherty — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:57:03 +0000

The McLeish Report stands in the same category as the 1964 Kilbrandon Report on Young Offenders which introduced the Children’s Panel system. Just as Kilbrandon was a rational, radical and humane response to dealing with young offenders, stressing that there was no clear-cut divide between the young person offending and the young person in need of care and protection, so McLeish proposes a rational, radical and humane response to dealing with the large proportion of inadequates who go in and out of the revolving doors of our prisons. Kilbrandon had to face the populist posturing of some of the politicians and media of the period and we can see from initial responses to the McLeish Report that the same culprits will be back in action forty years on. The reason to be optimistic is that there is no-one else with any other answers except to spend more and more money on more and more prison places with no significant impact on the incidence of crime. Also this is a very well-argued analysis with no shortage of evidence to help the Minister and other supporters to present the case for change.

The Problem

Scotland is certainly not close to being the worst in the world in rates of imprisonment (i.e. the number per 100,000 of population). The astonishing numbers in prison in the United States is far and away the most extreme in the world. While China has a rate of 189 including those awaiting trial, the American rate is 754 (2.3 million in prison with a disproportionate number who are black). Yet we hear no international outcry about human rights issues in relation to the brutal US penal system. The Scottish rate is now 141 but 10 years ago it was only 118 so we have experienced a substantial increase in a short period during which the main trend in most crime rates was static or downwards. How do we compare to other European countries? In Western Europe, Spain and England are highest and Scotland is close behind. Denmark, Ireland, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway have rates that are close to half the Scottish level. This clearly begs the question of why our society puts so many people in prison. In a decade there has been a 90 per cent increase in the number of women in prison and a 15 per cent increase in males. The annual cost per prisoner is £31-£40 thousand and if we continue to go down this path of ever-increasing prison numbers, that money has to come out of other budgets and there will be little for preventative and rehabilitation work. The current prison system has a very low success rate in changing behaviour. Only one third avoid reconviction within two years after release.

Who Goes to Prison?

The Report argues that prisons are acting as a catch-all for the social problems we have failed to deal with elsewhere. The growth in numbers has been driven by those receiving short sentences, not by long-term prisoners. 83 per cent of sentences were for six months or less.

Some indicators of prisoner profiles:

90 per cent of women in prison have drug or alcohol problems and 75 per cent have a history of abuse and serious health problems.

Compared to the general population, prisoners are:

13 times more likely to have been in care as children

13 times more likely to have been unemployed

15 times more likely to be HIV positive

70 per cent have suffered from mental disorders

20 per cent of men and 37 per cent of women have attempted suicide

80 per cent have writing skills of 11 year-olds

65 per cent have numeracy skills of 11 year-olds

50 per cent have reading skills of 11 year-olds

For prisoners under 20, the problems are even more intense.

Although the figures were not available until after the Report was published, over 9 per cent of prisoners in the UK have previously been in the armed forces, most having served in Iraq and Afghanistan so there are clearly issues around the impact of war and the armed services.

Prisoners also come primarily from a small number of poor areas. Half of those in prison came from 155 of the 1,222 local government wards in Scotland. Glasgow, Dundee and Inverclyde have around double the Scottish average rate and this correlates with the high levels of poverty. Periods of imprisonment can cause further problems for other family members in these communities and once someone has a prison record, the prospects of work become even more problematic.

For prison staff and other professionals in the penal system, these over-crowded, revolving door institutions provide little opportunity for the job satisfaction of positive work.

The Solutions

Since high prison numbers don’t reduce crime and fail to do so at a high cost, the alternative has to be to keep prison for “people whose offences are so serious that no other forms of punishment will do and for those who pose a threat of serious harm to the public”. The aim should be to reduce the prison population from an average of around 8,000 a day to 5,000. The standard punishment for less serious offenders should be ‘payback’ in the community, supervised by court-based social work units. But for this to work there must be an extension in the types and availability of suitable options, both in prosecution as well as sentencing. By payback is meant “constructive ways to compensate or repair harms caused by crime”. This can take the form of:

Making good to the victim

Making good to the community

Working towards personal change to reduce offending behaviour

Restriction on activities

There should be a three-stage approach to sentencing and managing CSS. The first stage would be deciding how much payback, then what kind and then provision for checking progress. To do the latter, there should be progress courts established to ensure quick and regular review of compliance.

In order to ensure that there is a radical shift in sentencing, judges who would otherwise have imposed a sentence of six months imprisonment or less, should be required to impose a CSS instead, except in particular circumstances. Also there should be legislation to enable the use of conditional sentences, suspending implementation subject to specific conditions. As well as alternatives to sentencing, there should be more alternatives to prosecution to reduce the delays before court appearances, ensuring that justice is swift.

The new system will require institutional developments at the national level to manage the change effectively:

National Community Justice Council. This would lead the implementation of the new CSS and develop improved services for ex-prisoners. This would involve representatives of the various stakeholders – social work, criminal justice, police, etc. It should be appointed by the Scottish Government but be at arms length from it.

National Sentencing Council. This would have responsibility for developing clear sentencing guidelines that can be applied nationally to improve the consistency of sentencing. This is already in the legislative programme.

Both of these bodies would work with the Parole Board for Scotland and the Scottish Prison Service. An important part of their role would be to develop better communication with the public and the media to increase public understanding and confidence in sentencing and resettlement. The Report emphasised the importance of being proactive in engaging with the public so that there is a wide understanding of what the new approach is trying to achieve.

16- to 18-Year-Olds. We should consider new arrangements for this age range. There should be options in secure youth facilities separate from older offenders and under-16s. There should also be a re-examination of the case for diverting 16-17 year-olds to specialised youth hearings.

Will It Work?

The evidence from other countries suggests that this approach can work but it will need investment in alternative services. This will, certainly in the medium term, be more than compensated for financially by the reduction in prison numbers. But there will be a short period of transition when the investment in alternatives will need to come before the savings in reduced prison numbers. The development of Community Service Sentence options will need to be imaginative, varied and well-prepared. The development work will also have to be primarily local since the demand and the work potential will vary from area to area. Engaging with local organisations will be central, not just in developing CSS programmes but in promoting informed opinion about the objectives of the system. The approach least likely to work will be to confine the discussion and planning of ‘payback’ to a small group of professionals.

A combination of useful work programmes plus skills training and personal development sessions will be the most appropriate payback package for many but they will need to be visible and significant in the outputs. They will often have to be delivered at peak ‘recreational’ time, partly for punitive reasons and partly to help those who have jobs to retain them and they will need good supervision. This will be a challenge to deliver.

Another major threat will come from those in politics and the media who will not be able to resist playing on public ignorance and fear. We can expect this from most of the unreconstructed Tories in the Bill Aitken mode but how Labour and Liberal Democrats respond will be crucial. The initial response by Labour’s Pauline McNeil was disgraceful. In the 1960s Labour at Westminster was in the forefront in delivering reform in youth justice in Scotland. In recent years people like Cathy Jamieson and Margaret Curran have tried to play to the tabloid gallery and we can only hope that this is modified when the decisions have to be made. All of this will have to be handled with political skill. Kenny McAskill has shown courage in promoting change. He should call on the services of those on the McLeish Commission to promote the proposals at Holyrood, local government and in the media. They have a strong case to present.

There is likely to be another source of opposition. The Sunday Herald’s revelation that the Glasgow Bar Association hired a PR company to attack the existing summary justice measures designed to keep more people out of court is an indication of one vested interest which will not like the reforms because overall they should result in fewer conventional court appearances and fewer legal aid fees. It’s PR company trawled the records to identify a few cases where the disposals appeared to have been used inappropriately and fed these to the media with no indication, of course, as to whom their clients were. On the other hand the Prison Service, social work and voluntary organisation involved in preventative and rehabilitation work should be supportive voices in this debate.

It would be a terrible reflection on Scotland if Westminster in the 1960s could pass rational, reforming legislation on penal policy but Holyrood in 2009 could not.

Isobel Lindsay is Chair of Wiston Lodge, a residential centre engaged in development and training work with young people.

The Bombs Didn't Work

Ellie Keen — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:12:41 +0000

The two big war and peace issues involving the UK since the founding of Scottish Left Review have been the Afghan and Iraq wars and the further entrenchment of Britain’s nuclear commitment with the decision to undertake the Trident renewal programme. The enthusiastic militarism of New Labour went further than most people on the left could have expected and, far from there being any interest in phasing out the Trident base, we had the decision to commit us to another fifty years of nuclear weapons (all of them now in Scotland).

SLR was far from being alone as a critic of these decisions. That went well beyond the traditional left and the peace organisations and involved much of civic Scotland. But we did produce a consistent critique since the Afghan war and have explored new approaches to international justice and peace issues. In the middle of the first phase of the Afghan war we said the implications were (January 2002):

1) The brutality threshold has been lowered. If you say you are engaged in an anti-terrorist campaign, you can do anything no matter how brutal and the NATO powers will give at least tacit support. You can destroy a whole city as in Chechnya or hundreds of Kurdish villages in Turkey and this will be ‘understood’.
2) Civil rights are disposable. If you say it is in the name of anti-terrorism, you can lock people up without trial or access any form of private communication.
3) The cowboys are in charge. International institutions and treaties are completely marginalised and the US will do what it wants, where it wants.
4) The UK is seen by the rest of the world as the European voice of America, just another client state.
5) Unless those with grievances are encouraged to develop non-violent resistance strategies, terrorism will be regarded as the only way to make an impact. The type of terrorism will become even more underground and difficult to track.
6) Good news for the arms industries. The message is that those with the most powerful modern weapons win. No-one may feel they can take on the US in a conventional military conflict but in relation to their own regional conflicts, the drive to acquire new weapons systems is set to increase.

A very accurate prediction except we have retrospectively to modify the last point. It was certainly good news for the arms industry and the security services industry but the ‘winning’ of this war and the later Iraq war was very short term.

There were many, including some on the left, who went along with the Afghan attack on the assumption that it would have a liberating effect from an oppressive regime, especially for women. Some simply thought it was inevitable that the US would have to find someone somewhere to bomb in revenge for 9/ll and that a ‘big bang’ success would be sufficient to satisfy the dented pride and prestige of the US. It might as well be the unpleasant Afghan regime as anywhere else and it was weak enough to be defeated quickly. Never mind the massive destruction of infrastructure and people in a poor country and the franchising of much of the fighting on the ground to brutal warlords. But even we underestimated how stupid and arrogant the Bush government would be in failing to focus on economic and social development for several years in Afghanistan before embarking on another major military adventure. While few can now defend the Iraq war, we are still subject to a stream of propaganda with the Labour Government, the Royals and the media spinning together a Boy’s Own tale of goodies, baddies and the prospect of victory, all of it just as deplorable and stupid as the initial war.

With the Iraq war we were in the mainstream and that mainstream has seldom been so right in its predictions. While opposition to the war brought Scotland’s largest demonstration for decades, it was one of the low points of the Scottish Labour Group at Holyrood that they refused to support a motion against the war that would have reflected the majority view of the Scottish public. In retrospect, it would have been opposition to this war and later to Trident renewal that could have given Scottish Labour a distinctive, non-Westminster identity but there was no vision or courage to offer that leadership.

The Iraq saga undermined most of what remained of Labour’s moral authority and, while there were individuals who honourably stood out against their leadership, the impact of the war diminished even further the numbers and conviction of the rank and file. On the other hand it encouraged alliance-building among all the others – the trade unions, the churches, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the SSP, the Greens, the Muslim community. This alliance was to continue around the other big war and peace issue – Trident – and was important, particularly for the SNP in helping it to gain acceptance among the left and civic activists.

In the third issue of SLR (February 2001), the late Tony Southall comprehensively outlined the case against Trident and the British nuclear role.

“When we take on Trident we should be clear that we’re taking on a critical part of the British capitalist state. Nuclear weapons were developed from 1946 when a state that had been getting economically weaker and politically less influential since the late 19th century tried to reassert itself by becoming the world’s third nuclear power and developing its own supposedly independent nuclear deterrent. Thus Britain was able to continue to justify a permanent position on the Security Council and its claim to sit at every table. The British bomb was one of the components in promoting the myth for its own population that Britons still ruled the waves. It took its place alongside the royal family, the supposedly democratic parliament, the legal system and a myriad of institutions that provided the kernel for the kind of flag-waving patriotism that’s a feature of English culture in particular……….It (the Blair Government) showed its manifesto commitment to pursuing worldwide nuclear disarmament was so much hot air as it voted against a UN resolution to set up a conference with exactly that aim.”

The only British nuclear weapons are now based at the Coulport/Faslane complex so the constitutional issue is closely interlinked with the disarmament issue. Were Scotland with full state powers to decide that Trident should go, it would be very difficult and expensive for Westminster to find a suitable site and build the necessary infrastructure. Campaigning against Trident had already accelerated over the past decade with the base blockades and hundreds of arrests so the announcement that the UK Government was proposing to spend billions on a new generation of nuclear weapons that would be operational for another fifty years was seen by many beyond the organised peace movement to be an outrageous decision and one that flew in the face of our commitments in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even before the vote was taken at Westminster, a massive and expensive project related to the new Trident programme was well under way at Aldermaston. This involved building the largest computer in Europe, a huge laser and other experimental design facilities and new bomb manufacturing development at Burghfield. The assumption was always that even if some Labour MPs rebelled, it would go through the Commons with Tory votes.

The reasons for taking what many, including some pro-nuclear sources, considered to be a premature decision was probably explained by technical developments in the US, the commercial interest of Lockheed Martin which runs Aldermaston, and the determination of Blair to commit to a long-term nuclear weapons strategy. It is to Brown’s shame that in the notorious Mansion House speech, he unequivocally said ‘Me Too’. This was a shock to many in Scotland who still believed that Brown would be different when he became Prime Minister. As with the Iraq war, opposition in Scotland covered a wide institutional range as well as a substantial popular majority.

But changes have taken place in Scotland over the last year. After the new Government came in last May, the Greens took the initiative to table a motion against Trident replacement. This time Labour abstained and the Liberal Democrats voted with the SNP and the Greens so the motion was passed with a substantial majority and is now official Holyrood policy. It has enabled the Scottish Government to convene a working group on Scotland Without Nuclear Weapons to examine what initiatives the Government could take within the devolution powers.

There is, of course, another dimension to the war and peace issues. What positive initiatives could we take in Scotland to promote peacemaking and global justice? Over the years in this magazine activists like Helen Stevens, Margaret Lynch, Judith Robertson, Liz Law have written about our need to develop alternatives to war and exploitation. Scotland needs to generate a new international vision. The Left has been right in its critique of militarism. It needs also to show that there are alternatives.

Isobel Lindsay is Vice Convener of Scottish CND