Scotland jails more of its citizens than any other European state

Published on Thursday 10 September 2009 22:11

SCOTLAND now jails more of its own citizens than any other nation in western Europe, despite crime rates falling to a 25-year low, new figures have revealed.

Scotland's official incarceration rate has even leapfrogged Turkey, traditionally seen as having one of the harshest penal regimes on the continent.

One expert yesterday said Scotland's soaring prison population had become an "international embarrassment".

Scotland officially had 8,124 people in its overcrowded prisons as of July of this year, driving its incarceration rate – the number of people in jail per 100,000 of the total population – to 157, according to the "World Prison Brief" from King's College, London.

That figure falls behind only Spain and Jersey, the tiny jurisdiction in the Channel Islands.

However, more than a third of prisoners in Spain and more than a quarter of those in Jersey are foreign nationals. In Scotland, just 2.8 per cent of those locked up are from abroad.

England and Wales have an official incarceration rate of 153, just behind Scotland. But 13.6 per cent of prisoners south of the Border are foreign.

One Scottish prison insider said: "We lock up more of our own people than anyone else in western Europe. We are basically completely out of kilter with our neighbours and the countries against which we benchmark ourselves.

"The politicians have to realise that the kind of levels of prison population we have are just not normal."

Robert Brown, the Liberal Democrat MSP, and a former prosecutor, said: "These figures are a dramatic representation of the failures of Scotland's prison policies over the years.

"While some countries are getting to grips with these issues, we seem stuck in a 'we must get tough' criminal justice agenda which just hasn't been working."

The Scottish Government – backed by a major commission led by former Labour first minister Henry McLeish – has called for radical reforms to cut prison numbers. Mike Nellis, a professor at Strathclyde University, said: "Scotland can take no pride in coming out at the top of the league table of countries who jail indigenous citizens.

"In fact, it is an international embarrassment. Sending more people to jail, in what is a coming age of austerity, is like sending more good money after bad."

A spokesman for the justice secretary Kenny MacAskill said: "These figures confirm what we already know. While crime has fallen in Scotland, we continue to lock up more offenders than ever before. Yet there is no evidence that the Scottish people are inherently bad."

Reoffending rates, the spokesman added, are higher for people who have served jail sentences than for those who are given an alternative to custody.

Bill Aitken, the Conservative justice spokesman, said: "Prison is acting as a deterrent in some of these other European countries. Clearly, in Scotland it does not."