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Professor John Robertson OBA

From BBC Scotland’s Andrew Picken, yesterday:

The number of people in Scotland’s prisons has risen back above the level which sparked the early release of hundreds of inmates to free up space. More than 300 inmates, half of whom were serving sentences for violent crimes, were freed in February and March after prison bosses warned they couldn’t take any more arrivals.

In the week before the process of releasing those inmates began, the total prison population stood at 8,326. Seven months on, it has climbed to 8,359 – and a Scottish government forecast suggested it could reach 8,750 by the end of the year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy504ynyp5eo

The early release was not ‘sparked‘ in February 2025 by a Lucy Adams interview with the Head of the Prisons service that same month but, more than a year earlier, on 16 May 2024 when the Scottish Government announced its plans, based on an earlier trend in prisons.

https://www.parliament.scot/bills-and-laws/bills/s6/prisoners-early-release-scotland-bill#target-0

What do Pickens and Adams not want you to know?

The maximum capacity of Scotland’s prisons is 8 475. 166 spaces available still – tight but not a crisis.

https://audit.scot/uploads/docs/report/2023/s22_231212_scottish_prison_service.pdf

The UK Labour government is releasing prisoners at FIVE times the rate of the SNP government and including those serving more than twice as long as allowed by SNP government scheme

According to BBC Breakfast 11 August 2025, the Labour Government has released 26 000 prisoners early and 100s of them were serving sentences of more than 10 years, since they came to power one year ago.

While there are no statistics for that same precise period, in 2024, according to the BBC, the Scottish Government only released 477 early and only those serving less than 4 years:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80e8n8pgv4o

The arithmetic to enable comparison will be all-too-familiar to you, I’m sure.

With 10 times the population, you might expect England to have only released 10 times 477 or around 5 000 but under Labour it has released 26 000, more than FIVE times as many!

Nearly 250 fewer in Scotland’s prisons after 18 years free of Con/Labour control

In 2024, a Council of Europe SPACE-I collection occurred on the 1st January and shows that Scotland continued to have one of the highest prison population rates in western Europe. On that date there were 140.5 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in Scotland. On this occasion, while in Northern Ireland it remained far lower at 94.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, the prison population rate in England & Wales was slightly higher than that in Scotland at 145.0 per 100,000.¹

‘Slightly higher?’ Once more, even among highly trained professionals, an inability to understand what small ratio differences in big populations can really mean for those from whom the data are collected.

A difference of 4.5 per 100 000 has to be multiplied by how many 100 000s there are in Scotland’s population of 5.5 million – 55. So, Scotland has 247.5 fewer in prison than it would have had the Cons and Labour been managing its prisons these last 18 years.

Source:

1. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/statistics/2024/11/scottish-prison-population-statistics-2023-24/documents/report-pdf/report-pdf/govscot%3Adocument/Scottish%2BPrison%2BPopulation%2BStatistics%2B2023-24%2B-%2BBulletin.pdf