Emma Jardine

The country’s prison population reached an average of almost 8,000 last year, an eight per cent increase since 2023.

Scotland’s largest jail, HMP Barlinnie, runs at approximately 140 per cent capacity with outdated and consistently failing infrastructure.

Emma Jardine, the policy and public affairs adviser at the independent penal reform organisation Howard League Scotland, said: “I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that we set a cap.

“How we use prison at the moment is that the receiving prison has no alternative but to accept the people that are sent to it by the court. It’s not in a position to say ‘we’re full, we can’t accommodate anybody else’.”

Following the passing of emergency legislation last year, inmates serving less than four years in jail were released in March after 40 per cent of their sentence instead of 50 per cent, in an attempt to ease overcrowding.

Justice Secretary Angela Constance said the move should result in a “sustained reduction” in prisoner numbers, but admitted it was not a “complete solution”.

Ms Jardine said: “Given that these are people on a short term sentence, the difference between being released at the 40 per cent point and the 50 per cent point of your sentence for many people was just a matter of days.

“That was supposed to be a permanent reduction of about five per cent of the total prison population. That may well be the case but with all the other things that are going on, it is never going to be enough to solve the issue.”

A cap on the UK’s prison population was last supported by David Blunkett, who as UK Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004, planned to cap Britain’s inmate population to 80,000.

His target, however, was short-lived and his successor, Charles Clarke, scrapped it.

Similar discussions took place in Scotland following the Scotland’s Choice report published by the Scottish Prisons Commission (McLeish Commission) in 2008, which recommended reducing the country’s prison numbers to a target of 5,000.

“Rereading the Scotland’s Choice report, which talked about a target set of the population must never go over 5,000, is kind of laughable now when the population is around 8,100,” Ms Jardine said.

“The report laid out very clearly what our choice was then, in terms of how we choose to use prisons, and we made the wrong choice, and we’re continuing to make the wrong choice.

“People have known for a long time what the answer is.”

Since the 1990s, the Scottish prison population has nearly doubled, with the number of inmates per 100,000 of population increasing from 119 in 1991 to 150 in 2025.

Even as Scottish prisons are bursting at the seams, recorded crimes have been decreasing and current numbers are only half of what they were during a peak in the early 1990s.

Ms Jardine said: “As the rate of crime is decreasing, we are increasing the number of people that we send to prison, and we’re sending people with long prison sentences to jail for longer.

“The answer here is to reduce the prison population. It’s not to build more and or bigger prisons, because that just turns a blind eye to the problem, which is simply that we are sending far too many people to prison.”

At 150 inmates per 100,000 of population, Scotland has one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe, compared with 111 in France, and more than double most Scandinavian countries.

Norway’s prison system holds just 63 prisoners per 100,000 and, since undergoing major reforms during the 1990s, has received particular praise for its focus on rehabilitation.

As a result, its recidivism rate has seen a dramatic drop from 70 per cent of all released prisoners committing crimes within two years of release to now just 20 per cent.

Ms Jardine said: “Should we be looking to them to learn from their culture, the way they treat the justice system there? Yes, and I think we already have.

“That’s one of the frustrating things. There are very famous prisons in Norway that are held up as the perfect examples of a rehabilitative prison environment.

“The Scottish government are well aware of those alternatives. They’ve been to visit them. They’ve referenced them repeatedly over the years.”

Based on the Nordic system, the government introduced a new type of detention facility called Community Custody Units (CCU) in 2022, which sees female inmates serve their sentence in shared houses embedded in a community.

There are currently two in Scotland, providing low supervision housing to a maximum of 30 people.

However, for the vast majority of the prison population, rehabilitation is being hampered by overcrowding.

The former chief inspector of prisons for Scotland, Wendy Sinclair-Gieben, said last year that criminal behaviours cannot be addressed while numbers stay as they are.

It has been reported that waiting lists for sexual offence rehabilitation programmes could take up to 14 years to clear if they stay at the current speed.

Ms Jardine said: “Rehabilitative programmes now are completely under-resourced, so the waiting lists for those programmes are incredibly long. Therefore, it is harder and harder to be able to amass the evidence that you can be safely released.

“And the longer you’re in prison, the less likely you are to be able to demonstrate that, because you are effectively often institutionalised by the length of time you have been in prison. So for some prisoners, it’s a very difficult situation they find themselves in.”

For many in Scotland for who see their country as humanitarian-focused, vocal on issues of human rights and social justice, the prison system presents an awkward divergence from this rosy self-image.

Ms Jardine said: “We talk a lot about being very human rights-focused in Scotland and being more social welfarist, and the children’s hearing system is a very good example of that.

“But the rest of our attitude towards criminal justice is not nearly as enlightened as we think it is, and we’ve allowed ourselves to use that narrative to explain – possibly excuse – what we do.

“Between the theory and the practice, there’s a big implementation gap that has been obvious for a long time. And it’s not really excusable any more.”

In response to this article, a spokesperson for the Scottish government said: “We have made clear we have a rising and more complex prison population that must be tackled and have taken a range of actions to do so.

“We also know that it is the case that crime has decreased and sentences increased, but there is no single reason for the increased pressure in the prison system and no simple or single solution to resolve an issue which all nations in UK are experiencing.

‘We have established an independent commission to review sentencing and penal policy to identify the most effective ways to address offending behaviour to help reduce crime and lower the number of victims.”