Voices in Justice: Parole Reform in Scotland: Consultation Analysis

3. The respondents and responses

3.1 This chapter provides information about the respondents to the consultation and the responses submitted.

3.2 Altogether, the consultation received 242 responses – 75 submitted through the Scottish Government’s online consultation platform, and 167 submitted by email or post. (Note that most of the responses submitted by post were from individuals currently in custody who completed the prison questionnaire described in paragraphs 2.2 and 2.3.) For further details on the number of responses submitted in different ways, see paragraph 3.7.

3.3 Substantive (i.e. personalised) responses were received from 198 individuals and 23 organisations. (See Table 3.1.) In addition, campaign responses were received from 21 individuals (see paragraph 3.8).

Individual respondents

3.4 The consultation received 198 responses from individuals. The breakdown of these individuals by type is shown in Table 3.2. The table shows that around two-thirds of individuals (125 out of 198, 63%) had experience (current or past) of being in custody, while around a third (74 out of 198, 37%) did not.

* Note that 21 individuals with experience of custody reported multiple designations – i.e. they not only had experience of custody (currently, or in the past), but they also had experience of being the victim of a crime, and / or were the friend or family member of someone who had been in custody.

Organisational respondents

3.5 The consultation received responses from 23 organisations. The breakdown of organisational respondents by organisation type is shown in Table 3.3.

* The ‘other organisation types’ category comprised two bodies representing professionals working in the justice sector, one penal reform organisation, one academic body, and one faith group.

3.6 A complete list of organisational respondents is shown in Annex 2.

Questionnaire version by respondent type

3.7 As noted in Chapter 2, two versions of the consultation questionnaire were produced: an online questionnaire, and a simplified prison questionnaire. However, information provided at Question 43 indicated that not all of those who completed the prison questionnaire were individuals in custody. Moreover, some of those who completed the online questionnaire had experience of custody. Table 3.4 below shows the version of the questionnaire completed by respondents of each type.

Campaign responses

3.8 As noted above, 21 identical (or near identical) responses were submitted to the consultation.^[5] These ‘campaign responses’ were all submitted by individuals (20 of whom identified themselves as family or friends of a person with experience of custody and one person who had experience of custody). None of the responses were personalised in any substantive way. The originator of the campaign was not identified in the response.

3.9 The campaign response followed the structure of the online consultation questionnaire.^[6] The campaign responses are not included in the tables in the report but are shown separately below the relevant table. This ensures that the campaign responses do not obscure, skew, or dominate the balance of opinion expressed by the non-campaign responses. Responses to the open questions from the campaign responses are included in the qualitative findings.

Response rates to individual questions

3.10 As noted in Chapter 2, not all respondents answered all the consultation questions. Response rates ranged from 86% to 98% for closed questions and from 47% to 81% for open questions. See Annex 3 for details.