Douglas Ross needs to learn from the smart people on prisons and offending - Kenny MacAskill

I doubt it crossed Douglas Ross’s mind when visiting a drug recovery centre with the First Minister this week that he was meeting with the same people that he’s been demanding should be locked up more often and for longer.

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross alongside First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during a joint visit to the Bluevale Community Hall in Glasgow. Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

Challenging wicked and depraved criminal’s re-offending’s is one thing, vacuous chants of “soft touch justice” are quite another. These aren’t heinous criminals and the solution isn’t to repeatedly put them in prison. The solution is solving the social problems that drive their offending.

A ministerial forward to a policy paper identified that, stating: “The Government’s penal policy is that the prison sentence should be imposed upon those, and only those for whom an alternative disposal is not appropriate.” That wasn’t an SNP Minister past or present, but the then Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind back in 1990.

Now I don’t know if Douglas Ross has ever been in a prison. However, I know a man who has been in many and dealing not just with the low-level nuisance offenders but the hard core serious and dangerous ones. That man is Professor Andrew Coyle, author of the book Prisons of the World. Scots may remember he was appointed Governor of HMP Peterhead in 1988 following the riots where the SAS were called in to rescue a prison officer taken hostage. He then moved south to HMP Brixton, an English institution with the same notoriety as the one he’d left in Scotland.

Subsequently, on leaving the prison service and entering academia, Andrew Coyle has become a world expert on prisons. A handbook written by him has become a United Nations template for prison management and he’s been called upon by governments around the world to assist.

He sat on the inquiry into the murder of Billy Wright, the Loyalist Volunteer Force leader shot dead inside the Maze Prison in 1997, with both the UK and US seeking his skills during an impasse in Palestine, following the assassination of an Israeli Minister.

The Middle East was even more tense than usual then, with the second Palestinian Intifada ongoing, when he was called upon to help broker a deal as an Israeli and Palestinian stand-off ensued. Meetings with Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat were required but arrangements for the secure imprisonment of those responsible were achieved.

So, Professor Coyle is no “limp wristed liberal”, as Douglas Ross might seek to denigrate him, any more than Malcolm Rifkind was when he responded to the prison crises that broke out on both sides of the border all those decades ago. He describes some of the prisons he has visited as “Dantesque” in their horror, whether they be the legacy Gulags east of the Urals in Russia or the gang-run institutions in Central and Latin America, where violence is endemic.

Professor Coyle doesn’t call for the abolition prisons anymore than Malcolm Rifkind did, but he concludes with reference to “justice reinvestment” when the huge sums we waste on locking up individuals are spent on the deprived areas they invariably come from.

Douglas Ross should read this book and act like Malcolm Rifkind, rather than spout banalities.

-Kenny MacAskill is the Alba Party MP for East Lothian,

A message from the Editor:Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by Coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.