Let’s try and abolish prisons then…

A politician has been mocked for calling for the abolition of prisons, but our prisons are definitely failing. Could ‘abolish prisons’ make any sense - and what would it look like?

When a Green MSP said that we should abolish prisons, the general reaction was a weary eye roll. Them Greens – what are they like? Mine was a bit different. Great, I thought, prisons are a total shitshow. What's your proposal? That, of course, is where my heart sank.

I can only urge politicians that if you say poorly thought-through things about important matters, then you make dealing with them harder. And things you say that just sound mad, but might not be if there is some plan, become actually mad if there isn't a plan. Politics is not slogans.

But let me repeat: our prisons are a shitshow that anyone would be hard-pressed to defend in terms of 'successful outcomes'. So what I thought I'd do is take the statement 'abolish prisons' at face value to see if it is possible and, if not, what the attempt tells us about what we could do better.

(The data in this article is indicative. Statistics on crime are highly variable and so not all of this data matches up neatly, but it is close enough. Most data is for men. Data on 'our' prisons is always Scotland, but some measures of the nature of inmates use England and Wales data.*)

So let's start digging into the prison situation. The first number we need to look at sets the scene. How many people do we jail? In Scotland, we currently have 152 people out of every 100,000 in prison. Straight away, we can see that that is more than eight per cent worse than England and Wales, where 142 people are in prison. From there, the comparators just keep getting worse.

France – 123 per 100,000. Austria and Belgium 99. Sweden 96. Northern Ireland 94. Republic of Ireland 87. Switzerland 76. Germany 71. Denmark 68. Netherlands 64. Norway 51. Iceland 35. Every single European country that jails more of its population than Scotland is a former Soviet country. We compare ourselves to people who used to have gulags.

So yes, unless there is something wrong with us, we are jailing too many people. And we are jailing too many people, but there is also something wrong with us – these aren't made-up crimes. We have too much antisocial behaviour in Scotland, and people want something done about it, hence prison.

What is wrong with us then? Well, let's kick off with 'damned tabloids'. They never, ever create a moral panic about sentences being too long, and we know politicians cave to the tabloids. Hence, what is known as 'sentencing inflation' – we are sending people to prison for 62 per cent longer on average than we were for the same crimes 20 years ago. That is a giant mistake.

Next, let's look at who is in prison. Crime statistics are usually collated based on what the prisoner did (which is fair enough), but what if we look at other factors, including psychological factors? This starts to pose some uncomfortable questions. For example, in the population as a whole, something like three percent have formal learning difficulties, and about ten percent are dyslexic.

Among our prison population? More than 30 per cent have formal learning difficulties, and 50 per cent are dyslexic. Now tell me that this doesn't look like we've created a society where there is no place for people with learning difficulties other than locking them up.

What about the countries that lock up fewer people – is that because there is less crime? The data really doesn't match up precisely here, but let's look at Iceland anyway. There appear to be over 600 crimes per 100,000 population per year in Iceland, of which 36 go to jail. Scotland had 569 crimes and sent about 150 of them to prison.

This suggests we're jailing people at about five times the rate of Iceland. So, is Iceland hell to live in? Definitely not. I've been a few times, and you most certainly don't get any sense of a nation beset by antisocial behaviour.

Very roughly, it looks as if in theory we could let 75 per cent of the prison population out of prison, and if we had Iceland's society, it would be fine. I'll come back to what that means in a minute.

These are not the only indicators that there are people in jail whose problems are not necessarily 'an evil heart'. One of the most overwhelmingly upsetting figures I've seen is that about 80 per cent of men in Scottish prisons have an identifiable history of head trauma. This says victim, it says chaotic life, it says surrounded by violence.

What we are seeing is a very strong indicator that enormous amounts of the prison population are there because of environmental factors. Neither learning difficulties nor the likelihood of having been hit on the head are genetic indicators that you're a bad person. Yet these categories are way out of proportion in prisons, so something external is causing it.

The answer is chaos. Personally, I wish we had better language for this because when we say 'chaos,' we may think of trying to get the kids out the door to school in the morning, and that's not what 'chaotic lifestyle' means. It means no sleep because the drug dealers upstairs were playing loud music until five in the morning. It means four addresses in two years.

It means you missed a third of your days at school. It is extreme anxiety and not being able to pay bills. It probably means you skipped meals and almost certainly means you're not working. It probably means you experience violence. Addiction is likely. No amount of prison undoes that.

And of course, you then have the two in five people in a Scottish prison who haven't been convicted of anything yet. The disaster zone, which is our current court system, can't cope, so we park people in prison. I want you to get this next number into your head – that costs £60,000 per person per year.

“This is the point – you can abolish prisons but what are you going to do with organised crime and psychopaths and cunning, intentional, murderers, or people who have no justifiable reason for their actions?”

This is what is so nuts – that's £60,000 a year to definitely make things worse. We know for certain that sending someone to prison reduces all likely future indicators of 'good citizen'. Be it 'universities for crime' or habituation to violence or loss of social skills, prison is a revolving door.

About two in five prisoners released from jail are back inside within a year. If their purpose is to keep people safe, they've failed. And then let me give you one of the reasons; sometimes crime isn't exactly a choice. I knew someone who developed a drug habit, got into debt and was forced to become a drug courier. He got caught, was jailed, and the gang bosses threatened his family if they didn't pay his debts.

He was never going to get out of debt. This was his life now. He's no longer alive. Really, he didn't need prison at all; he needed a debt programme and drug rehabilitation – about half of prisoners are addicts when they go into prison.

All of this shows you something like two-thirds or more of prisoners who really don't need to be in prison, but that doesn't mean we don't need to be protected from them. We do. The causes of the crime may suggest better routes than prison, but the crime itself hurts people. If someone in your street smashes your window, you don't want them back a week later, ‘because they got away with it because they were dyslexic.’

In any case, pretending it isn't happening is no good either. It'll just keep happening. It requires an intervention. There are three I would posit as alternatives to prison. First, prevent. Having police on the streets at random doesn't have a big impact, but if you've got communities with crime problems, then regular police presence makes a big difference.

In fact, it has been estimated that two cops on the beat prevent 88 assaults. Sticking police behind a desk is not the solution, and nor is cutting numbers. That said, I think we also need much more social work presence too – think 'social workers on the beat'. Very often, early intervention, negotiation and support do even more than early policing intervention.

Now let me give you an investment decision – one police officer costs about £60,000 a year, just about the same cost as keeping a prisoner (you can get a social worker for a little more than half that). But that police officer can prevent 44 assaults. If half of them end up in prison, averaging six months each, that's nearly £750,000 saved. I mean, that isn't a margin call, is it?

Next, we need to get into these communities because it is dreadful that we have abandoned them. Remember 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'? Well, when are we going to get tough on the causes? Again, £60,000 buys you a significant amount of local community development. We need to invest in communities with problems, not in jailing them.

But – and this is at the heart of it – the real problem with the 'abolish prisons' argument, if you have nothing else to say, is that you can only think if you haven't been a victim of crime. I'm anti-prison, and I've seen crimes take place where I desperately want the perpetrator punished and us protected from them.

And that's why I'm such a fan of the 'therapeutic communities' model I was writing about a while back. Most of our revolving-door criminals don't need to be punished; they need stability, a break from chaos, a chance to regroup and start again. Creating isolated communities where people can live as an alternative to prison with integrated support to get people off drugs, off violence and into work or training costs a lot less than prison and works a lot better.

So yes, I honestly think I could abolish about two-thirds of prisons. But this completely overlooks another factor – sociopaths make up about four per cent of the general population (it is probably more than this in reality), but about a third of the prison population. That is a neurological condition.

Now that does not mean that a sociopath (which is neurological) has to be a psychopath (which is neurological-plus-antisocial-behaviour). Effective counselling and offering better life opportunities can work every bit as well for someone sociopathic as for anyone else. That does not mean they don't need to be removed from society in the interim.

This is the point – you can abolish prisons, but what are you going to do with organised crime and psychopaths and cunning, intentional murderers, or people who have no justifiable reason for their actions (Peter Murrell, for example)?

If you are determined to get rid of prisons, then you could medicalise aspects of this (I live near Carstairs, Scotland's hospital for the criminally insane, and we don't want to be closing that...). It might even be a better solution, but it just means overcrowded state hospitals and costs even more.

But organised crime isn't a mental condition, and it isn't an environmental or social issue; it is a business that trades on evil. I could come up with many, many models with many, many names which could take this group of people out of circulation. But if I'm honest, they're just euphemisms for prison.

That's my honest conclusion. Yes, prisons fail much, much more than they succeed. Yes, what we're doing clearly isn't working. Yes, there is a very solid reason why many people in prison would be better off not being there. But no, hand on heart and with every effort made, I cannot completely abolish prisons without playing pointless semantic games.

Some people cannot be allowed to be free in society. They are a minority of prisoners, but they don't disappear just because you want a progressive Scotland. Which means there is absolutely no viable case for the complete 'abolition' of prisons.

But could we instead have a proper debate? Because we really are failing.

*Note: I started putting links to the research the stats are based on into the article, but there are over 20 different individual sources, and this isn't an academic paper, so I've decided to leave them out. You can get a very good oversight of the situation in Scotland from this report. The rest is easily replicable from web searches. Or you could take my word for it...