Managing the numbers, not the causes

This week’s In Common looks at the Government’s plans to extend the presumption against short custodial sentences in a bid to lower incarceration numbers, and what other alternatives could be utilised when imprisonment doesn’t work.

There is an unspoken assumption running through Scotland’s current prison debate: if we reduce the use of custody, the problem of overcrowding will begin to solve itself.

Policy attention has therefore settled on sentencing practice – most notably the proposal to extend the presumption against short custodial sentences from 12 months to 24. The logic is clear enough. Scotland’s prison population is at record levels. Facilities built for 7,800 now hold over 8,400. Early release schemes have already been used to create emergency space. Staff warn that the estate is operating beyond safe limits. 

In that context, discouraging short sentences appears both rational and humane. Short periods in custody are disruptive without being transformative. They sever employment, destabilise housing, strain family ties, and often do little to address the behaviours that led to offending. Evidence suggests that community disposals can produce lower conviction rates than brief imprisonment. 

On its own terms, then, the shift away from short custody is defensible. 

But decarceration cannot be measured solely by how many people leave prison. It must also be measured by where they go instead – and what happens to them when they get there. Reducing the use of custody without building rehabilitative infrastructure risks creating a vacuum rather than a solution.

Prison, for all its failures, still performs a crude stabilising function: it contains risk, imposes structure, and can interrupt chaotic patterns of living. 

When custody is scaled back without equivalent expansion in treatment, supervision, and support, those stabilising functions do not disappear. They are displaced – often back into the very communities least equipped to absorb them. This is why the conversation around alternatives matters more than sentencing thresholds. If prison is to be used less, other institutions must be built to do the work prison does badly. 

One area receiving renewed attention internationally is the therapeutic community model. These are structured residential environments focused on behavioural change rather than punishment. Participants live collectively, engage in intensive therapy, address substance dependency, undertake education or vocational training, and contribute to community governance.

The regimes are demanding, requiring accountability, emotional labour, and long-term engagement; that intensity is precisely the point: transformation is treated as a social process rather than an individual moral failure. 

Evidence from therapeutic community programmes – particularly for individuals whose offending is linked to addiction, trauma, or chronic instability – suggests meaningful reductions in reoffending when compared with short custodial sentences. 

What distinguishes these models is philosophical as much as practical. Prison asks how wrongdoing should be punished. Therapeutic interventions ask what conditions produced it – and whether those conditions can be altered. For a significant proportion of the prison population, that distinction is not abstract. Substance dependency, untreated mental illness, unstable housing, and exposure to violence are disproportionately present. Criminality in these contexts is often entangled with survival, coping, or coercion rather than predation alone.

Punishment without intervention simply returns individuals to the circumstances that generated the behaviour.

Rehabilitative alternatives attempt something more ambitious: they treat offending as a point of entry into support systems rather than the endpoint of state engagement. This does not mean they are soft options. Properly resourced, they can be more demanding than custody – requiring daily participation, sustained compliance, and visible progress. But they offer something prison rarely can: continuity between accountability, and reintegration. 

International comparisons illustrate what happens when such alternatives are embedded systematically rather than appended marginally. Norway’s often-cited penal reforms were not achieved through sentencing changes alone. They involved a wide reorientation toward normalised living conditions, intensive staff engagement, education access, and structured post-release planning. The aim was not simply to incarcerate less, but to produce fewer future prisoners. Rehabilitation was treated as public safety policy, not offender privilege. 

The lesson is not that Scotland can import another country’s model wholesale. Institutional cultures, legal frameworks, and social contexts differ. But the principle travels: decarceration succeeds when investment in alternatives keeps pace with reductions in custody. Without that parity, reform risks becoming administrative rather than transformative.

There are already warning signs of this imbalance. 

Community justice systems, unpaid work programmes, and supervision frameworks face capacity constraints. Expanding their use without scaling their resources risks overextension – weakening compliance, diluting support, and undermining credibility with courts and the public alike. Alternatives to custody must be operational substitutes, not rhetorical ones. 

There is also a legitimacy dimension. Public consent for penal reform is rarely secured through abstract evidence alone. It is shaped by whether communities feel safer, whether victims feel recognised, and whether alternatives appear structured rather than permissive. If decarceration is experienced through early release headlines or reduced custody optics – without visible investment in supervision, treatment and reintegration – confidence erodes. 

Sustainable reform requires institutional visibility: people must be able to see what is replacing prison, not simply that prison is being used less. None of this negates the case for reducing short custodial sentences. There remain compelling reasons – evidential, financial, and humanitarian – to do so. 

But sentencing reform is the narrowest lever in addressing prison overcrowding. It acts late, after the social, economic, and institutional failures that shape offending have occurred. Rehabilitative alternatives, by contrast, operate earlier and more constructively. They attempt to change trajectories rather than simply manage consequences.

If Scotland is serious about reducing its prison population, it cannot rely on sentencing reform alone. Decarceration will only endure if investment in rehabilitation keeps pace with the retreat from custody. Otherwise, overcrowding will not be solved, only displaced.