Coronavirus: Scotland may release prisoners close to end of sentences

Prisoners approaching the end of their sentences could be released from next week, as the Scottish government moves to prevent an “increasingly alarming” coronavirus crisis in the country’s jails.

Scotland’s justice secretary, Humza Yousaf, said on Friday that he was “actively considering” options for early release: “I cannot envisage a situation where we’re seeing the rate of infection, the spread of the virus in our prison establishment, the rate of absence amongst our prison officers and staff, where we do not release prisoners to make that a safer environment.”

Yousaf told BBC Scotland’s The Nine: “We are actively looking at options to do that. It could happen as early as next week. The situation is increasingly alarming.”

Scotland’s prisons are badly overcrowded, creating the perfect environment for virus transmission. As of Friday, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) confirmed that 111 individuals across 10 establishments were self-isolating.

The UK justice secretary, Robert Buckland, said on Tuesday he was considering temporary release as one of a number of options to mitigate the public health crisis in English prisons, after campaigners warned that prisoners with health issues were “facing death sentences”.

There are currently two mechanisms available for early release in Scotland – home detention curfew which is almost always used for prisoners sentenced to under four years, and temporary release towards the end of a longer sentence.

But Yousaf added that the Scottish government would be considering whether further powers for emergency release were necessary ahead of Holyrood’s own emergency powers bill, which will be debated this Wednesday.

He added: “To reassure the public, this would be done with the appropriate risk assessments in place, we’re talking about people that would be towards the end of their sentences.”

Last Monday, the SPS suspended all family visits which the Scottish Prisoner Advocacy and Research Collective (SPARC) warned is detrimental to the mental health of those in custody as well as their loved ones.

SPARC has called for the provision of free stationery, phone credit and tablets so all prisoners can make use of video-calls during the health crisis, alongside a lifting of the ban on mobile phones. Non-internet enabled mobile phones are already being distributed in prisons in England and Wales.

Writing for the Scottish centre for Crime and Justice Research, Dr Cara Jardine of the University of Strathclyde called on the Scottish government to take radical action, but cautioned: “Reducing the prison population through early release will require careful planning, coordination between agencies, and likely additional funding alongside wider government support. Criminal justice reform in Scotland has tended to be incremental, particularly with regard to prisons, and despite prolonged efforts to bring down our prison population, it has remained stubbornly high.”

Despite the Scottish government’s emphasis on “smart justice”, which last year saw the extension of a presumption against short-term sentences to 12 months, the prison population remains the second highest in western Europe.

Last October, Europe’s anti-torture watchdog warned of “emergency” conditions, in a damning report that highlighted the overuse of segregation, and inmates confined to their cells for lengthy periods of time, sometimes in less than 3 sq metres of living space.