Should prisoners get cash pay-outs for slopping out?

Compensation should be used to fix the problem or given to victims

WHEN Michael Howard was the home secretary, he jailed more people and crime fell, but he also made it a priority to improve prison conditions as regards slopping out - and as a result ensured that the practice ceased. The same attention was given to the issue in Scotland when the last UK Conservative government set aside funds to tackle the issue in an effort to end slopping out by 1999.

This was done as part of the commonsense approach to human rights which had always been adopted in Britain, as a result of which we had a commendable record.

It is right that prisoners suffer a loss of certain rights when they go to jail, but slopping out is degrading.

However, the fiasco that has resulted in 44 million being set aside to benefit convicts has meant that, in some circumstances, a life of crime can pay. Scotland is now being made a laughing stock and the reasons are plain to see.

Firstly, the Executive took the decision to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) directly into Scots Law in 1999.

This was done with undue haste and without considering the consequences - not just in this area, but for example in the change to a presumption in favour of bail, rather than a presumption in favour of public safety.

As a result, the application of the convention changed from protecting against an individual's rights being abused to a compensation scheme for crooks and convicts.

Lawsuits have been threatened not only over slopping out, but prison boredom as well. This is madness.

Secondly, Jack McConnell took the deliberate decision to use the money set aside to deal with slopping out for other purposes.

As a result, he left the Scottish Executive and the Prison Service wide open to claims under ECHR.

As Lord Bonomy said: "[The Executive] took a deliberate decision not to address the [cell conditions], when they both had the resources and the capacity to do so." And that decision was, he said, "purely and simply a matter of choice by the respondent [the Labour/Lib Dem government]".

With their army of special advisers, it defies belief that the potential consequences of this action were not realised.

This is incompetence and negligence on a grand scale, and a situation that rightly angers every right-minded tax-payer in Scotland.

They do not work hard and pay their dues to society only to see those who have offended society get rich quick at a time when they should be paying a penalty for their crimes.

The Bonomy judgment is correct, but is it wrong that prisoners should benefit from such compensation.

Prison exists for three main purposes: to deter, to punish and to rehabilitate.

The compensation money should go to ending slopping out, to the rehabilitation of prisoners and to provide staff for such rehabilitation programmes.

That way, society gains from a lower repeat crime rate. Any excess money should then go to compensating real victims of crime, not those who carry it out. If any money has to go to criminals, then perhaps there could be a silver lining to the storm cloud created by the Executive's crass handling of the issue.

The real victims of crime - those mugged, robbed and abused - could in turn sue the prisoners for the real suffering that they have inflicted.

That would be real justice, not the rough justice currently on offer.

The law does not exist to save the Executive from its incompetence. Its day of judgment will be at the ballot box.

Margaret Mitchell, MSP, is the Scottish Conservatives' justice spokeswoman.

YES: John Scott

Legal action is the last resort for those subjected to degradation

AS YOU read this, you may be sitting on a bus or at a desk with your morning coffee. Chances are that you did not start your day with a queue of others carrying urine bottles, chamber pots, cutlery and plates, jostling to empty two and carefully rinse the others. All this after spending the night in a small concrete box with a stranger who used his bottle or pot while only a few feet away.

Even those with a strong stomach might be forgiven for leaving the rest of their croissant.

These are the conditions suffered by thousands of Scottish prisoners over the years and still endured in three prisons today.

The Executive has known since 1999 and the Scottish Office for at least five years before that the practice of "slopping out" was degrading and unacceptable. Money was available to end it, as happened in England about ten years ago. It was spent on other things, despite many warnings that this would be more expensive in the long run.

And now the warnings have come true. Up to 44 million has been set aside to pay to affected prisoners. Is this a disgrace? Of course. Are there better ways to spend this money? Of course. Is it the fault of prisoners or lawyers? No.

Prisoners have little say about their conditions. Life for them is not like Big Brother, with relative luxury, such as the jacuzzi or diary room, where souls can be unburdened.

Remember also that the contestants can leave whenever they want.

I wish that everyone could see inside a prison and realise the truth of conditions there. The myth of life inside as a holiday camp could not be further from the truth.

At its best, there is the mind-numbing boredom, with ready access to drugs as brief respite. At its worst, prison still sees an unacceptable number of our young men and women ending their own lives.

And, yet, they cannot readily protest about their conditions in a way which will be heard. Court action is the last resort. The Executive is responsible for this situation.

What do we want from our prisons? Safety from the dangerous few. That is the one job we might all agree still needs prisons. We use them as the skip for all society's other problems - the bad, sad and mad. But the hospitals are full, and our psychiatrists are too busy to deal with those who have personality disorders.

And, to top it all off, we put people in conditions which would make Nelson Mandela resentful.

In England in the early 1990s, a report on prison riots said: "When courts send prisoners to prison, they are entitled to expect that prisoners will be treated in accordance with the ... duty to look after them with humanity ... However, to lock up prisoners for long periods at a time with no alternative but to use a bucket for their basic needs, which then has to remain in the cell ... is manifestly inconsistent and makes a mockery of that duty ... It is not just.

The commitment we have proposed (eliminating slopping out by 1996) would remove a practice which is a blot on our prison system and which undermines the justice of the sentence which prisoners are serving."

That blot still stains Scottish prisons. The excellent staff cannot do the job that they are trained to do because of overcrowding and the vices that accompany it.

We get out of our prisons what we put into them. Most of those currently incarcerated will be released. Let's be really selfish and treat them with the humanity that we want them to show us.

Maybe then the Executive won't be scared to spend the money on decent prisons (and more alternatives), rather than waiting to spend more avoidable millions on compensation.

John Scott is a solicitor-advocate and the chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Centre.

YOUR VIEWS

Rights forfeited

Lord McCluskey has hit the nail firmly on the head. The wording of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights is so imprecise and so capable of the widest interpretation that it invites arguments and propositions which, in effect and practice, are absurd.

The citizen has a right to freedom, but he also has a corresponding duty to obey the laws of the state. Should he fail to perform that duty, he forfeits the claim to the corresponding right, thus, in these circumstances, a convicted criminal loses the right to freedom.

What does that involve, in addition to the obvious punishment of being locked up? I suggest it essentially involves other unpleasant consequences, such as having to endure the indignities of going to bed and rising to order, eating and exercising at certain ordered times, sharing a cell with others whom he may dislike, hate or fear - the list can be extended indefinitely, and, of course, it can include the unpleasant task of "slopping out".

But where does one draw the line? Imprisonment necessarily carries with it disagreeable consequences - they are not punishments or tortures, simply facts of prison life, many of which are indeed unpleasant. It could be argued that many can be regarded as being affronts to dignity and breaches of the criminal's human rights - rights of privacy, rights of personal decision-making, and general loss of freedom.

If the argument in the Napier case is carried to its logical conclusion, can we expect the next bright lawyer to advocate a claim that it is an affront to dignity and a breach of human rights to force a convicted criminal to share a cell with other criminals?

BAIRD MATTHEWS

Newton Stewart

Real justice

The only people who seem to benefit from the Human Rights Act are criminals and, as a result, law-abiding citizens are worse off: financially, through the cost of legal aid and compensation; and physically, through those accused of serious offences being bailed out to attack again.

Perhaps a neat quid pro quo would result if those who had genuinely suffered psychological damage from housebreakings, assaults, etc, could now claim compensation from the criminal responsible. But that would be too much like real justice and would no doubt be opposed by the legal establishment.

JOHN ELLIOT

Better use of money

Once a person is convicted of a crime and sent to prison, they no longer should have any human rights (depending on the crime). What about the victims' human rights?

Here are two alternatives on how to use the money:

1, If convicts are compensated, immediately transfer their money to their victims.

2, Instead of paying out compensation to convicts, put the money towards the building of bigger, better prisons because the way this country is going, everyone will want to commit a crime because it seems to pay.

If they had not committed a crime in the first place they would never had landed up in prison and, needless to say, they would not be slopping out.

V M CURRIE

It's gone too far

My wife and I are strongly against prisoners receiving compensation for having to slop out. My wife is a nurse in Ninewells Hospital in Dundee and quite often has to clean up after an "accident" in a bed, or to empty bed pans. It is something expected of the nursing profession.

I can understand the change in policy to outlaw slopping out but certainly not to allow the paying of compensation.

TERRY CRUICKSHANK