The price of sloppy indecision on prison sanitation

THERE are two distinct issues involved in the fiasco surrounding the escalating bill - now £44 million and rising - being footed by taxpayers for compensating convicted criminals who were forced to slop out in Scottish jails.

First is the incompetence of the Executive (and before it, the Scottish Office) in failing to end timeously the unsanitary practice of slopping out from prison cells that have no toilets. Slopping out was ended in England a decade ago when it first became obvious that the practice was likely to fall foul of the European Convention on Human Rights; not to mention the fact that treating people like animals is hardly conducive to any hope of rehabilitation.

However, the Scottish Office and later the Executive decided to bury their heads in the political sand until last year, when the inevitable test case occurred. In April 2004, Lord Bonomy ruled that the Executive had breached a prisoner's human rights by imposing a "degrading" and "abhorrent" practice on him. Defending the indefensible action cost the taxpayer 1.5 million. After that test case, the floodgates were open to monetary compensation for hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners or former inmates. A legitimate human-rights issue has become a gravy train, and the honest taxpayer is paying.

This bill could easily have been avoided if the Scottish Office or the Executive had followed the English example. In particular, the former justice minister and deputy first minister, Jim Wallace, was well aware of the problem for four years and did nothing. The sad part of this incompetence is that the cash should have gone to fighting crime or much-needed (and expensive) drug rehabilitation programmes for young offenders.

But there is a second issue here, and it is one of natural justice for ordinary citizens who are the victims of crime. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority makes monetary awards to the innocent victims of violent attacks. In our topsy-turvy society, it should come as no surprise that the standard tariffs for such compensation often fall below the compensation received by convicted criminals in the slopping-out dispute. A victim of rape trauma, for instance, is awarded only 7,500.

The violent robber, Robert Napier, who won the first slopping-out case, received 2,450 plus costs. If Mr Napier had fractured someone's skull, the victim would have received only some 2,500 - but only if the victim had reported the matter instantly. Yet Mr Napier and his fellow inmates have no such statute of limitations.

Slopping out is insupportable. But so is political negligence. And so is rewarding the criminal more than the victim.