Short-term prisoner release point: responses to targeted consultation

Response from Upside

Question 1: What are your views on changing the release point for certain short-term prisoners to 30%?

Since 2024, the justice system has relied on successive release-point interventions to manage prison population pressure, including STP40 and two separate Emergency Early Release processes. STP40 was intended to deliver a sustained reduction in the prison population, while Emergency Early Release measures were introduced to provide short-term relief in response to acute capacity pressures. In practice, population pressures have re-emerged following each intervention, necessitating further action.

Upside recognises the severe and sustained pressure on Scotland’s prison system. However, STP30, like its predecessors, affects only the timing of release without addressing the factors that shape how many people are sentenced to custody in the first place. Without consistent community alternatives to custody across all areas and adequate support available across sectors, courts are unlikely to reduce their use of prison sentences. Where confidence in community options is limited, custody continues to be used more frequently than necessary, meaning that people continue to enter prison at a rate that changes to release points cannot offset.

Accelerated release processes increase the importance of effective preparation, coordination and system capacity at the point of liberation, none of which is consistently available through current mechanisms.

During the current Emergency Early Release process, Upside recorded a more than 30% increase in lost contact post-liberation among people released through EER, compared with baseline levels for people supported by Upside outside emergency release processes. Loss of contact removes the system’s ability to identify risk, coordinate advocacy across agencies or intervene early, and is a known precursor to crisis, disengagement and return to custody.

STP30 also does not address the sustained pressure created by high levels of remand. While release-point changes do not apply to this group, successive early-release processes nonetheless have significant indirect effects on people on remand. Repeated emergency and accelerated release activity disrupts regime stability, increases movement within establishments, and diverts staff and system capacity toward managing compressed release processes. Where this occurs, Upside’s ability to build meaningful, trust-based relationships with people on remand is significantly reduced, despite having a remit to support this population. Without that engagement, people on remand are more likely to leave custody without support in place. Leaving prison unsupported increases the risk of immediate instability in the community, including housing insecurity and disengagement from services, which in turn heightens the likelihood of reoffending.

People with lived experience of custody and release consistently describe the point of liberation as a break in continuity rather than a managed transition, with unclear handovers and fragmented responsibility across services. Evidence from Upside Voices highlights that effective, relationship-based advocacy is not an added benefit but a necessary requirement for navigating housing, health, benefits and justice processes at this point.

Policies such as STP30, alongside repeated emergency early-release processes, shorten preparation time and normalise an emergency mode of delivery. This makes it significantly more difficult for Upside to dedicate sufficient time to building and sustaining the trust-based relationships on which effective advocacy depends. As attention and capacity are diverted toward managing ongoing release activity at pace, advocacy is weakened and responsibility for coordinating complex systems is increasingly placed back onto the individual at the point of greatest vulnerability.

Sustained operation in this mode also places significant strain on the workforce, contributing to staff burnout, reduced retention and diminished service capacity. At the same time, accelerated release without adequate preparation displaces risk and demand into other parts of the system including housing, mental health, health and social care services and families.

Multi-agency planning meetings alone are insufficient to mitigate risk. While such meetings have been used during Emergency Early Release, they are not backed by sufficient resource, statutory footing or system capacity to secure stability at scale. In addition, the preparation timescales associated with early release are often too compressed to enable effective, tangible solutions to be put in place. Coordination without authority, time or capacity cannot deliver continuity or stability at the point of release.

Housing is a critical and immediate constraint. Scotland is currently experiencing a national housing emergency, with 13 local authority areas formally declaring emergencies. Where people leave custody into unsuitable temporary accommodation, or no accommodation at all, instability increases sharply. Although homelessness prevention duties are being developed, they are not yet operating at scale for people leaving custody, and there is currently no statutory requirement on the prison system to prevent homelessness at the point of release. Responsibility for housing outcomes therefore remains fragmented, with limited leverage to act early or decisively. Introducing STP30 ahead of these frameworks means that predictable homelessness is not an unintended consequence, but a structural feature of the release process.

To date, release-point interventions have largely been assessed on their short-term impact on prison population levels, with limited evaluation of wider system impacts or the risks transferred beyond the prison estate. Evidence from STP40 and successive Emergency Early Release processes indicates that release-point adjustments, when introduced without accompanying structural reform, have not delivered sustained reductions in the prison population. Implemented under the same conditions, STP30 is likely to repeat this pattern, providing short-term relief while leaving the underlying drivers of overcrowding and churn un-addressed.

Without urgent action to strengthen community alternatives to custody, reduce unnecessary remand, accelerate the implementation of existing reforms, and align statutory duties with the realities of accelerated release, this policy will, at best, provide temporary relief to the prison system whilst pushing pressures on to community services. More critically, repeated reliance on emergency population-management measures risks absorbing system capacity into continual crisis response, reducing the time, focus and organisational space required to deliver the structural reforms needed to reduce reliance on custody.

For Upside, this dynamic also undermines the purpose for which the service was established. Capacity is diverted from planned, relationship-based throughcare into managing the consequences of emergency release, including tracing and re-engaging people released at pace. This creates circumstances in which some people receive a poorer quality of support due to reduced preparation and continuity, while others are unable to access the service at all because capacity has been consumed responding to emergency processes.

Question 5: What are your views on the proposed transitional approach to initial releases?

Upside recognises that a phased or tranche-based approach to initial releases is necessary to avoid overwhelming already stretched services. Releasing all eligible people simultaneously would be unmanageable and would significantly increase risk across the system. Although Emergency Early Release is due to conclude before STP30 releases begin, in practice planning and delivery activity will overlap, drawing on the same staff, systems and local services and leaving little or no meaningful period of recovery between the two processes.

Experience from STP40 and successive Emergency Early Release processes shows that phasing does not resolve the main risks associated with accelerated release. While staggering releases can moderate immediate volume, it does not address the shortened preparation timescales, constrained housing availability or limited statutory engagement that shape outcomes at the point of liberation. In a system that is already operating beyond sustainable capacity, these risks can only be mitigated to a limited extent, even where releases are phased.

From a practical delivery perspective, the location of liberation is also critical. During the first tranche of the most recent Emergency Early Release process, of the people supported by Upside who were returning to addresses in the North of Scotland, the majority were liberated from establishments in the central belt. This placed significant additional strain on staff capacity and often meant people arrived back in their home areas too late to access housing, support or statutory services on the day of release.

Liberation away from a person’s local area undermines release planning, continuity of support and access to accommodation, particularly where preparation timescales are already compressed. In these circumstances, even well-coordinated planning is less effective, and the likelihood that people leave custody without meaningful support in place increases.

Transitional arrangements also extend the period during which services are required to operate in an emergency delivery mode, further diverting capacity from planned release work and system reform. For services such as Upside, phased implementation prolongs the diversion of capacity from relationship-based throughcare into reactive release management, limiting the scope to improve preparation and continuity even over a longer rollout.

Consideration should be given to whether people will be added to eligibility throughout the transitional delivery and how this will be managed, as new additions can be extremely challenging for support services to respond to. Minimum standards should be agreed in collaboration with delivery partners to allow for appropriate planning, including risk management and addressing critical needs.

Upside considers a transitional approach necessary to manage immediate volume, but even with commitments to local liberation and improved preparation, the scope to reduce risk is inherently limited in a system that is already operating beyond sustainable capacity. Transitional arrangements may reduce the peak impact of initial releases, but they do not address the underlying constraints that drive instability at liberation.