Achieving a Sustainable Prison Population: Justice Secretary's speech

Presiding Officer, I move the motion in my name. My visit the day after my appointment as Justice Secretary was to HMP Edinburgh to see the level of pressure faced by the Scottish Prison Service due to an increasing prison population.

It is clear that staff want to focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending but that is increasingly difficult to do. I want to put on record my thanks to the dedicated prison officers and staff across the prison estate, who are working tirelessly to maintain a safe and supportive environment for those in their care.

Presiding Officer, while recorded crime overall has fallen in Scotland over the longer term, there has been a marked increase in the reporting, investigation and prosecution of serious offences including sexual crime and serious organised crime.

I welcome our justice system, through the police and courts, ensuring justice is done. And I know victims show enormous bravery and trust in our legal system in reporting crime, something I want to continue.

We are strengthening confidence in the justice system and ensuring police, prosecutors and the courts have the powers that they need to bring perpetrators to justice.

I am of course concerned by the rise in sexual crime and domestic abuse crimes. While victims have confidence to come forward, including on historical crimes, we must remain focused on tackling such horrendous crimes, and importantly prevent them happening.

We are taking action to strengthen confidence in the justice system and ensure the police, prosecutors and the courts have the powers that they need to bring perpetrators to justice. Sexual and domestic abuse crimes are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women, and ultimately, men must change their behaviour.

The Scottish Government funded Caledonian System is a good example of a community based programme that aims to address the behaviour of men who have been convicted of domestic abuse alongside providing support to affected women and children.

My priority is to prevent crimes, but when they do happen, prisons must be a safe and effective place where such offending behaviour can be challenged and addressed through programmes and other rehabilitative work.

Presiding Officer, there are more individuals remaining in prison longer, creating a cumulative demand on capacity across the estate whilst also meaning the population is  increasingly more complex to manage including dealing with health and social care needs.

Presiding Officer, I make no apology for serious crimes meriting serious sentences. Scotland shows a clear and persistent trend of increasing average custodial lengths, including a 37% rise between 2014-2015 and 2023-2024. These figures should not be interpreted as solely attributable to sentence inflation, because other factors, such as the mix of offences heard in court also continue.

The remand population also remains high, with what can be complicated, detailed cases taking longer to conclude.

And Scotland is not unique in experiencing prison population pressures, with many comparable countries recording increases in their prison population, but being one of the highest in western Europe must be addressed.

Scotland has taken a number of steps to alleviate these pressures. Reconfiguration of the prison estate realised around 400 additional places and two further new prisons will deliver a further 460 spaces. I expect HMP Highland to be completed in Spring 2027, later than planned due to construction issues, and HMP Glasgow, which I visited last week, in 2028.

We have extended the eligibility for Home Detention Curfew and expanded the use of alternatives to remand, with bail supervision numbers in 2024/25 being the highest in ten years.

We implemented the Emergency Early Release scheme between November 2025 and April this year, which saw 614 individuals released early with around 60% within 3 months of their original release date.

We also incrementally changed the point of a sentence that certain short-term prisoners are required to serve in custody to 30%, resulting in an estimated sustained reduction of around 550 prisoners, which is an equivalent to the total design capacity of HMP Grampian.

Presiding Officer, I am engaging directly across the justice system to identity areas where action could be taken quickly to help reduce this pressure further.

We are embedding multi-disciplinary teams in courts to ensure critical and relevant information is available to judges ahead of decisions on custody, helping to reduce avoidable periods of short remand that are necessitated for further information.

And we are undertaking analysis to understand the complex reasons why individuals fail to comply with Community Payback Orders and bail conditions. CPOs are delivering strong outcomes with 71% successfully completed and mostly without breach in 2024-25.

I believe we can do better to address the reasons behind breaches and improve this success rate and I am working to identify what interventions and support will drive improvements in compliance, thus reducing avoidable short term custody.

Presiding Officer, despite these measures, the prison population today stands at 8459, having recently peaked at 8,603 - around 800 places above the estate’s design capacity. This poses an unacceptable level of risk to those living and working in Scottish prisons and to the wider justice system.

Additionally, reasonable worst‑case long‑term projections indicate that, without action, demand for prison places will rise to around 9,500 within the next decade.

Further action is therefore necessary now to put our prisons on a sustainable footing to ensure our justice system can focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending without compromising public safety.

Presiding Officer, attainment of a sustainable prison population requires fundamental change. The independent Sentencing & Penal Policy Commission’s evidence based report recognised the need for a greater focus on community interventions to reduce reoffending and for rehabilitative work in prison to support effective reintegration of individuals in the community.

The Commission was clear that prevention is the most effective route to a sustained reduction in the prison population. This is my first priority – preventing crime before it happens and reducing the number of victims as a consequence.

Therefore, this government will continue to intervene early to steer people away from crime and focus on areas such as substance dependency, health, poverty, homelessness and employability - all significant contributing factors to offending.

I will be clear now, as this government has always been, that the removal of liberty for those who pose the highest risk is an important and integral part of our justice system and prisons will continue to be necessary.

But we want to see less crime, so we have fewer victims. Which is why support is needed even after an offence has been committed to minimise risk of reoffending and returning to prison following release.  Which is why my priority is to ensure prevention of crimes and also prevention of further re-offending behaviour.

So Presiding Officer, this makes financial sense. Every prison place costs us over £52,000 a year. This financial year we are spending nearly £510 million in resource funding for SPS to run our jails.

Yet evidence shows that com­munity sen­ten­cing in areas such as non-viol­ent crimes is more effective, with the reconviction rate for those given Community Payback Orders in 2022-23 at 28.6% compared to 53.2% for those completing custodial sentences of one year or less.

It is also significantly cheaper to the taxpayer with an estimated cost of a CPO per unit being between £1,251 and £6,778, depending on requirements and complexity.

So Presiding Officer, today I am proposing bold reform that will strike the right balance across custodial sentences, community sentencing and the need to robustly protect victims and the public. Other countries have achieved reductions by changing their approach and we can too.

So let me outline those plans in more detail.

First, I have instructed the Scottish Prison Service to exhaust all options for further maximisation of the existing estate and to set out an approach for how we can further increase the number of places. This will include the affordability and deliverability of additional capacity, including consideration of temporary modular accommodation and further houseblocks at existing prisons. I expect business cases on these soon.

Alongside further places, a smarter approach to custody is needed, and I remain committed to using all levers at our disposal. That includes continuing to expand the use of Home Detention Curfew which supports reintegration by providing a structured return to the community. We have already made GPS technology available, and I want to see that expanded, and we will now also introduce a geographical pilot of GPS with bail, building on action we have already taken to allow radio frequency monitoring of bail curfews.

Alongside this, I want to make full use of community-based alternatives where it is safe, proportionate and effective to do so. Because we know that short custodial sentences can increase the likelihood of reoffending while community sentences are more effective at supporting lasting rehabilitation.

A statutory review of the National Strategy for Community Justice, which sets out the long-term aims and priority actions that strengthen alternatives to custody, has been published today and will give stakeholders the opportunity to have their say on the direction of community justice.

I am also publishing today an eight week public consultation on a number of proposed changes to make a sustained change in our prison population with a focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending.

The consultation will seek views on amending the definition of a short-term prisoner from those serving less than four years, to those serving less than five years to better reflect the existing sentencing powers of the courts and to bring Scotland into alignment with the Council of Europe’s position that sentences of five years or more constitute long-term imprisonment.

The consultation will also seek views on how we can deliver a more effective approach to custody, including as the Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission recommended, extending the Presumption Against Short Sentences from 12 to 24 months; enhancing Community Payback Orders to increase confidence in their effectiveness and support their wider use; and strengthening the bail test, to reduce the number of people remanded with no real prospect of a custodial sentence of less than 24 months.

Presiding Officer, The Penal Commission noted that the current arrangement for long term prisoners, where some are released on non-parole licence into the community six months before the end of their sentence, does not allow for effective reintegration and recommended these individuals to have more time under supervision in the community on licence.

The vast majority of long-term prisoners will ultimately be released from custody. The question is therefore not whether these prisoners will return to the community, but how safely that return can be managed. I agree with the Commission that an extended period of supervision could benefit the management of risk and ultimately reduce reoffending.

Therefore, the consultation will also seek views on release arrangements for long-term prisoners including amending the point of release on non-parole licence for some long–term prisoners to two-thirds of their sentence with the remainder of their sentence in the community under strict supervision and licence conditions. That is the position that we had in place pre-2016 and those convicted before that date still have that in place. The consultation will also seek views on extending these changes to those on extended sentences.

It is imperative that we find the right balance between punishment, rehabilitation, risk management and reintegration and this proposal would enable a more proportionate approach, where an individual still serves their sentence but with a greater proportion served in the community under supervision, and therefore a greater likelihood of their successful reintegration into society, reducing risk of them reoffending.

Robust safeguards are in place to manage long-term prisoners in the community who are subject to individualised risk assessment and licence conditions. They must abide by all conditions on their licence and can be recalled to prison.

Individuals convicted of sexual offences and some violent offences will also be subject to Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements.

To conclude Presiding Officer, I recognise that these proposed changes are bold and hope this can contribute to thoughtful debate today on the consequences of not addressing a rising prison population and also the outcomes of any sentence for a crime committed. Justice to be served, and no further reoffending to happen. Therefore change is needed and the consultation provides an opportunity to hear the views of victims, partners and the wider public on all of these measures. And I can assure colleagues that my officials and I will continue to work with victim support organisations throughout that process.

I believe these proposals outlined today will help us strike that right balance between recognising the concerns of victims and survivors and charting a clear course towards a sustainable prison population in the long term.

They will ensure that prevention is at the heart of our system, with prisons housing those who pose the greatest risk, rehabilitating them to effectively support successful re-integration into society, and, ultimately, reducing crime and protecting the public.

Less crime, fewer victims – something, we all wish to see.