 I不錯 morning, and welcome to the fourth meeting of session 6 of the Criminal Justice Committee. Apologies have been received this morning from Katie Clark. The first agenda item is to agreed whether to take item 6 in private, which is consideration of today's evidence. Are we all agreed? Our next agenda item is consideration of two affirmative instruments. Firstly, the draft conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Immunities and Privileges Scotland Order 2021 and the draft European Union and European Atomic Energy Community, Immunities and Privileges Scotland Order 2021. I welcome to the meeting Ash Denham, Minister for Community Safety, Susan Black, Senior Policy Officer, Civil Law and Legal System division and Joanne Tinto, Solicitor, Constitutional and Civil Law division of the Scottish Government legal directorate. I refer members to paper number one and I invite the minister to speak to the draft conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Immunities and Privileges Scotland Order 2021. The draft conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Immunities and Privileges Scotland Order 2021 confers various legal immunities and privileges upon the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and specified participants. COP26 is considered to be the most significant climate change event since the 2015 Paris agreement. It is the biggest summit that the UK has ever hosted and welcoming this climate change conference to Scotland is a huge honour. To enable COP26 to fulfil its purpose and to take place successfully, it has been agreed that certain privileges and immunities require to be granted to certain attendees. A coast country agreement negotiated between UK Government and UNFCCC secretariat regulates the privileges and immunities that are to be afforded to certain COP26 attendees. For example, certain tax exemptions and immunity from legal process. The agreement obliges the UK to abide by the terms of the protocol on privileges and immunities. The order that is before the committee today gives effect to those agreed obligations insofar as they relate to devolved matters in Scotland. Equivalent provisions in respect of host country agreement obligations for reserved matters and devolved matters in the rest of the UK is being made by order in council at Westminster. However, to the extent that privileges and immunities relate to devolved matters, that obviously rightly falls to the Scottish Parliament. Subject to parliamentary consideration in this Parliament and at Westminster, both orders in council will then be signed. In order to assist the committee, I will just say a little bit, if that is okay, convener, about the nature of the privileges and immunities involved. The order provides that the representatives of parties to the UNFCCC, the Kyoto protocol and the Paris agreement, the representatives of observer states and officials of the specialised agencies of the UN will have immunity from suit and legal process. Those immunities cover things done or omitted to be done only while exercising their official functions in connection with the Glasgow conference and during their journeys to and from the conference premises. It also provides for the inviolability of any private residence used by representatives during COP26, exemptions and privileges in respect of personal baggage and exemption or relief from all devolved local taxes. Importantly, the order permits that immunity can be expressly waived by any appropriate party or state. The order also provides limited immunity from suit and legal process for representatives of the executive board of the clean development mechanism. That immunity is only conferred whilst the executive board is exercising their official functions as part of the conference and that immunity can also be waived by the secretary general of the UN. It is customary for a sovereign state to grant such privileges and immunities to diplomatic missions and international organisations to enable them to function. The host country agreement agreed between the UK and the UN in respect of COP26 is broadly in line with global practice and includes provisions to ensure that immunities and privileges do not impede the proper administration of justice. It is important to emphasise that immunity does not provide carte blanche for officials to ignore the laws and regulations of the host country. The privileges and immunities conferred by the draft order are granted primarily on the basis of strict functional need. It is being agreed by the UK and the UN that there are no greater extent than those required to enable the COP26 and the specified individuals connected with the COP to function effectively. Immunities and privileges are limited in that they only apply to official functions undertaken in connection with the Glasgow conference and can be waived and they do not give an individual freedom to commit criminal activity. The immunity is similar but more limited to that which has been for generations conferred upon diplomats working in foreign jurisdictions. As with diplomatic immunity, all individuals benefiting from privileges and immunities in Scotland are expected to respect Scots law, both criminal and civil. To conclude, the draft order implements the agreement that the UK has reached with UNFCCC in line with global practice. It enables COP to hold its 26th conference in Glasgow and conduct associated activities in the UK while ensuring and upholding protections for the effective administration of justice. As a good global citizen, it is the responsibility of the Scottish Government to bring it forward to the Parliament. Thank you very much minister, that's very helpful. Can I open it up to members if you have any questions? I'll now invite ministers to speak to the draft European Union and European Atomic Energy Community Immunities and Privileges Scotland order 2021. The purpose of the European Union and European Atomic Energy Community Immunities and Privileges Scotland order 2021 confers immunities and privileges in so far as they are within devolved competence upon the delegation of the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Agency or Eurotom and their staff members, diplomatic agents and their family members. Those privileges and immunities are conferred in accordance with the UK-EU establishment agreement. The order before the committee today will give effect to the devolved aspects of that agreement. Equivalent provision in respect of reserved matters and the devolved matters in the rest of the UK has already been conferred by legislation at Westminster and that was in July 2021. However, to the extent that the privileges and immunities relate to devolved matters, that falls to the Scottish Parliament. Before I go into the draft order in further detail, it might be helpful to set out the background. Following the UK's departure from the EU, the EU established a delegation to the UK and that delegation replaced the European Commission representation. The EU delegation is responsible for representing the interests of the EU in the UK and for coordinating among the 27 EU member states. EU delegations exist in over 140 countries outside the EU around the world. The EU negotiates establishment agreements with each of those countries in which it has delegations in order to regulate the EU's status, privileges and immunities. Legislation is required to implement those agreed obligations from the UK-EU establishment agreement into domestic UK law. Two separate orders are required, a Scottish order and a parallel UK order. The UK order came into force on 22 July this year. Whilst there are contingency measures currently in place by virtue of the EU withdrawal act of 2018, without a Scottish order being made, there remains disparity between Scotland and the rest of the UK in giving effect to the establishment agreement. The details of the order are that the order treats the EU delegation, including Eurotom, in broadly similar terms to those agreed with other non-EU Governments globally. Important provisions are included to ensure that the immunities and privileges conferred do not impede the proper administration of justice. The order provides the EU delegation with criminal, civil and administrative immunity when operating within their official activities. The premises and archives of the delegation in so far as they are in Scotland are also to be invaluable, while the property and assets of the delegation in Scotland are to be immune from search, confiscation or other interference. EU staff members who have been notified to the Foreign Office as diplomatic agents will have their criminal, civil and administrative immunity, including the inviolability of their residence. Diplomatic agents and their family members are also not obliged to give evidence as witnesses, and their personal baggage is exempt from inspection unless there are serious grounds that can be shown for doing so. The draft order will also confer criminal, civil and administrative immunity in respect of staff members, including immunity from personal arrest and detention, but again only in respect of the exercise of their functions within the scope of their official activities. Staff members also receive inviolability of their official papers and correspondence. The draft order provides for certain fiscal exemptions for the delegation at staff and their family members, and those include exemptions from direct taxes on the assets, property, income and operations of the delegation. The diplomatic agents, staff members and their family are also afforded various exemptions in respect of their furniture and personal effects, as well as relief from paying council tax. However, they are not entitled to any benefits paid in respect of devolved matters. Importantly, the order permits that immunity can be expressly waived in certain circumstances for both diplomatic agents and staff members and their family members. Immunity in inviolability is not conferred in respect of any alleged road traffic accidents and road traffic incidents. To conclude, the draft order implements the establishment agreement that the UK has reached with the EU regarding its delegation in London and, in line with global practice, enables the delegation to conduct its activities in the UK whilst ensuring and upholding protections for the effective administration of justice. The European Union delegation plays an important role in the UK-EU relationship, supporting a partnership based on friendly co-operation, so I commend it to the committee. I invite any questions from members. You explained that very thoroughly, so I did not really have any questions, but I thought it was just worth noting that you specifically mentioned that it would not be immunity from road traffic incidents, because that is the one that sprung to my own thinking about the immunity issue around road traffic. I do not have a question, but I just wanted to note that and thank you for your thoroughness. I thank Pauline McNeill for noting that that was a change and that is a specific carve-out that has been agreed for this instrument. In that case, we will move straight on to item number three, which is the formal business in relation to the instrument. Our next agenda item is consideration of motions for approval for the two affirmative instruments. I invite the minister to move that motion, number 926, that the criminal justice committee recommends that the conference of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Immunities and Privileges Scotland order 2021 be approved. I now invite the minister to move that motion, number 00931, that the criminal justice committee recommends that the European Union and European Atomic Energy Community, Immunities and Privileges Scotland order 2021 be approved. I invite the committee to agree to delegate to me the publication of a short factual report on our deliberations on both the affirmative SSIs that we have considered today. Are we all agreed? That completes consideration of the two affirmative instruments and I thank the minister and her officials for attending. Our next agenda item is a round-table discussion about prisons and prison policy. I refer members to papers numbers three and four. We will take evidence today from a round table of witnesses who will be joining us virtually. I'm sorry that you cannot join us in person, but this is due to the current rules around social distancing. I welcome our panel of witnesses this morning. We have Mr Allen Staff, chief executive of APEC Scotland, Mr Bruce Adamson, children and young people's commissioner, Wendy Sinkler-Gaban, Her Majesty's chief inspector of prisons for Scotland, Dr Katrina Morrison, committee secretary of Howard League Scotland, John Watt, chair of the parole board for Scotland, Mr Philip Fairley, assistant general secretary of the prison officers association in Scotland, Professor Fargus McNeill, professor of criminology and social work at the University of Glasgow's Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, and Ms Theresa Medhurst, interim chief executive and Alistair Purdy interim director of operations at the Scottish Prison Service. We very much appreciate you taking the time to join us this morning. I thank those witnesses who have provided a written submission and they are now available online. I intend to allow around an hour and 15 minutes for questions and discussion. Please can I ask members to indicate which witness you are directing your remarks to. We can then open the floor to other witnesses for comments. If other witnesses wish to respond, please can I ask you to indicate that by typing an R in the chat function on blue jeans and I will bring you in. If time permits, if you are merely agreeing with what the witness is saying, there's no need for you to intervene. Other comments you make in the chat function won't be visible to committee members or recorded anywhere, so if you want to make a comment please do so by requesting to speak. We will now move directly to questions and please can I ask members and our invited guests to keep your questions and comments as succinct as possible. I'm very keen to encourage a free flowing discussion. I'd like to start off by inviting Pauline McNeill to ask some questions and then I'll bring in Rona Mackay. Thank you, convener. Good morning to everyone. My question is around the conditions that prisoners on remand and other prisoners are held in our prison estate. I'm sure I don't need to say, but just for the record, we have some of the highest numbers of prisoners on remand in Europe, the average of 18 months, notwithstanding that we've had the pandemic, these figures are alarming. What I'm interested in for, and there's quite a few members of the panel I'm interested to get an answer from, I thought perhaps Wendy Sinclair, daughter Katrina Morrison from the herd, they feel fairly untreatable. I might like to answer this question, which is, is it time to consider that there should be some specific rights, particularly for remand prisoners and the prison population generally, around being out of their cell a certain time in the day? I'm certainly keen that all prisoners should have a right to have fresh air. I realise that there are capacity issues and estate issues. I'd also like to put on record my admiration for what is done by prison officers and those involved in running our prison estate. The papers dug deep into the intricacies of our rising ageing population and all the things, so I'm really conscious of that. I'm interested in moving forward in Scotland into the future, looking to the future, where I'd ideally like to be. Is it time for specific enforceable rights or even a charter of rights for prisoners to be allowed out of their cells once a day, or a prescribed amount of time, and to get fresh air? Perhaps it would be easy if I just start with Wendy Sinclair, the prison inspector. Good morning. I'd be delighted to answer that. The remand prisoner is something that has exercised me for a long time. I think that there are some fundamental principles that need to be explored. One is that there are human rights that are designed for all prisoners, regardless of whether they are on remand or convicted. Therefore, the charter of rights already exists, and because we signed up to Opcat, we should be following those guidelines. The second part of that is that there is a real need to review the prison rules, which inhibit some of the things that would make a difference for remand prisoners. The third part for me is that we need to have a recognition that, for somebody to be remanded in custody, they've already tangled with the police and entered the criminal justice system. Therefore, we need to tackle the criminogenic reasons behind that, even if that is poverty, debt, etc. For me, I see no reason for remand prisoners to not be afforded the existing privileges, and furthermore, for remand prisoners to be able to access everything except for those activities that relate specifically to convicted offenders. Dr Catriona Morrison from the Howard League is just the same question. Thank you for the question. We strongly believe that it's not good enough, first of all, that we've got so many people on remand, and second of all, that the regime that they have is so reduced and restricted, especially in light of the fact that 57% of them go on to not even receive a custodial sentence when they are sentenced. That's either because they're found not guilty or they receive a community sentence. The time that they have in custody absolutely has to be spent well because the stigma that exists for them and for potentially their families outside is the same as a sentence prisoner. We would absolutely support any proposals to give them the same opportunities for work and access to programmes, etc., that the rest of the population have. Phil Fairlie from the Prison Officers Association. Good morning and thanks for the question. I think that you touched on it yourself. The issue for us is capacity and the ability to have resource and the time to give to the unsried population. We'll probably get into some of the reasons as to why capacity is tied up the way it is in the prison system. We get talking about overcrowding, which I'm sure will come up, but part of that overcrowding is the numbers of untried that we've got inside our system. There are simply too many people sitting in untried conditions inside our prisons and the ability to do all that we would want to do with them simply does not exist. We don't. There's no pride or satisfaction for prison staff who, by and large, are doing no more than warehousing some of that population behind doors for long periods of time. There's no satisfaction or pride in any of that. There's nothing meaningful being delivered by that other than keeping somebody out of the community. However, if we're serious about tackling that and doing something about it, it is a capacity and a resource issue. It's the elephant in the room often in some of these discussions that we have around prisons, but if we're genuinely serious about tackling it, it will require a rethink in terms of what we mean by resource. Thank you very much. Can I just ask Theresa Mayters if she would answer the same question? Thank you very much. Good morning, committee members and colleagues. Thank you for the question, Ms McNeill. I would like to say that I would agree with a number of the points that have already been made. The prison rules are one area where there is a require to refresh and better reflect a more modern prison system, if you like, so that is something that needs to be taken forward. The time out of selling fresh air is enshrined in prison rules. That was limited during the early part of the pandemic, but it has been consistently in place since then for everyone, not just those on remand. The final thing that I would say about service provision is that, as was pointed out earlier, there is the same disconnect for people coming into custody on remand and for the period of time that they are in remand between them and their families and communities, as there are for people on short-term sentences. Although there are services and supports available in prisons for those on remand, that provision is variable. We need a degree more consistency in that. In order to do that, as Bill rightly points out, there are resource and capacity issues. Through a real focus on improving our digital capacity and capability, there is a lot more that we could do as a service in ensuring that there is consistent provision regardless of whether or not someone is on remand or serving a sentence. Mr Adamson, you were keen to come in on that and say a few words. Yes, I was, convener, and thank you so much for the questions, McNeill. I think that it's really important that we consider that there are a number of children on remand in the adult system, and I strongly associate with what the Office of Her Majesty's Fix for Prisons in Scotland has been saying about the fact that there's a human rights framework already in place for this, in particular in relation to children who are entitled to additional rights through the convention on the rights of the child. It's really concerning that our track record on this in Scotland in terms of remanding children in young offenders institutes is really concerning, and much more so than the adult population. So, while in the adult population it's around 26 per cent, I believe, the average for children and young people is actually around 80-85 per cent. It fluctuates, but that much, much higher percentage of children who are NYOIs are there on remand as a vast majority are there. That's a really significant concern because they spend a lot longer time in sales than those who have been sentenced and they experience the least amount of support and activities. It's very important that we address that, but primarily by getting those children out of detention. It's really important that we look at the bail and remand provisions and early release provisions, particularly in relation to the Covid regulations, because no child under 18 should be remanded or sentenced, and there should be a presumption of alternatives to custody. I'm really concerned that, since the onset of the pandemic, there's not been a proper assessment of whether the children that are in polmont pose any risks and why they can't be managed in the community. They should have been included within the early release scheme, but they weren't included in that. That's contrary to all the human rights advice from the viewing committee on the rights of the child, but also the Council of Europe's statement on principles in relation to the pandemic and emergency measures. Children are being disproportionately affected by that. Remember that children are everyone up to 18, so that's something that we need to take urgent action on in getting all children out of institutions, particularly in the context of Covid, into more appropriate ways of receiving support. Did you say that that figure was 80 to 85 per cent? Currently, it's around 88 per cent, but the figures that we have from the daily population data have been fluctuating. Firstly, it's gone up. It was sitting around two thirds, but since Covid, it's actually gone up and now fluctuating between 76 per cent, right up to 94 per cent, actually, in April this year. We are talking about relatively low numbers, around 20 or so. It fluctuates about 120 individuals covered throughout the year, but about 20 at any given time, so I appreciate that that plays into the statistics. The underlying point being that the majority of children who we put into the adult prison system—that's everyone up to 18—are there on remand, and that's hugely concerning, so I think that this is a really urgent point that we need to focus on. I think that we need to talk about why children are in the first place, they shouldn't be, but remand children particularly. Before we move on, I think that you would like to come in on this as well. Yes, thank you. I'd like to amplify a little bit something that Torita mentioned. A person in any kind of custodial sentence suffers significant disruption to their life, particularly around areas of employment continuity, relationships, accommodation and so forth. There is no distinction between a person who is on remand and a person who has a sentence, except that there are a number of services available for assisting people when they come out of a sentence. Those services generally don't cater for people coming out of a remand situation, but the problems that they face are identical. In many ways, people coming out of a remand situation may be more disadvantaged. I would just highlight that this is a significant problem and one that we shouldn't take our eyes off. Thank you very much, Mr Staff. I think that just to keep the flow of questioning, if I may, I'll bring in Mr Findlay and then I'll bring in Ms Mackay after that. Thank you. It's a question for Bruce Adamson, who's already touched on the issue of young people entering prison and being remanded and that initial cycle of violence becoming a thing that defines them and sets off the whole chain of continual offending. When we visited the Lord President a couple of weeks ago, he told us that we will look back and regard the way that we treated young people as barbaric—that was the word that he used—and this morning brings news reports that the Scottish Sentencing Council is calling for the courts to make rehabilitation rather than punishment a primary consideration. So, the judiciary seemed to be on the same page. Have we turned a corner or is this just more of the same from a Scottish Government quango? Really welcome the announcement today from the Sentencing Council. I think that the starting point needs to always be that we see children as children in the first instance and we take a rights-based approach to their work. I think that we have been making progress in Scotland, but not at the level of urgency that is required by the rights of children and young people. Again, I agree with the chief inspector in terms of the way that she set out the challenges that we need to face. The primary thing is that children under 18 should not be deprived of the liberty in prisons or young offenders institutions. We need to focus on ensuring that children receive the support through really good quality, intensive support, possibly in a secure setting, but not through a prison system. That urgently needs to change. Sentencing is part of that, so it is useful that we have some progress in relation to the promise that the Care and Justice Bill and the incorporation of the convention on the rights of the child need to move much, much quicker, because locking children in prisons as punishment is contrary to international law and standards. We need to make sure that we focus on children being all the way up to 18 and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, particularly in its general comment 24, focuses on being child justice. We need to rethink the way in which we focus on how we support children under 18 who are in conflict with the law. The Scottish Sentencing Council, the new guidance, is a very welcome step that is based on really strong research that looks at the brain development and taking into account trauma, poverty, addiction, mental health and adversity, and setting that within a human rights-based approach. The announcement that that has been submitted to the High Court for approval this month is really important because it will allow courts to have greater regard to rehabilitation for all young people up to 25, but that includes the way in which children who are in the justice system are dealt with. That is really important. I know that the committee will hear from another round table on child justice after that, which I think will be really insightful as well, but the really important focus is getting children out of the criminal justice system and properly respecting and protecting their rights to be seen as children first. Claire Lighthuller, in her Rights Respecting report, highlighted that 37 per cent of children aged 12 to 17 who have been charged with offences were dealt with in the adult system rather than the children's hearing system, and that goes up to 83 per cent for 16 and 17-year-olds. Until we rectify this, our justice system is going to continue to fail to support and recognise the rights of children as children in the first instance. Long answer to your question. It's a good thing, but not fast enough. Thank you. I have one more question, and it's for Teresa Methurst. ITV News this week said a series of reports from Barlinnie prison. I'll ask you more about that later, but, in relation to that, the Howard League's submission to this committee talks about an initiative called the through-care support officers not being reinstated, and he describes this as an abdication of responsibility in the part of the Scottish Government. One Barlinnie officer talked quite proudly and passionately about the work he does in liaising with prisoners once they've left prison and how that can be so beneficial. Why is there such a gap between the rhetoric from the Scottish Government and the reality? And will this scheme be reinstated, do you know? Thank you very much, Mr Finlay. You're right to highlight the through-care support and the scheme that was in existence in the Scottish Prison Service up until 2019, when there was significant overcrowding and the need to focus staff on operational delivery at that time. There was an evaluation undertaken of the through-care support scheme, which was highly positive, and the staff who were involved in that scheme brought in real-life experience to share across the service to help staff to understand when people leave custody, some of the barriers and difficulties that they face and some of the reasons why we have that revolving door and people continually returning to custody. What I would say is that we are looking at the through-care support scheme for prisons and we will consider how best we move forward in relation to both the learning from the initial scheme and other learning from other services across Scotland. Just before I bring in Ms Mackay, I will ask witnesses if they can keep their responses fairly succinct and members keep their questioning fairly succinct. We've got quite a lot of subject areas that we would really like to get through today. I will bring in Ms Mackay. Before I ask my questions, I will put on record how much I agree with what Bruce Adams has been saying about keeping children out of prison. It's a clear-cut situation and it's urgent. For all the reasons that Bruce articulated, I would like to agree with that. My question is about the number of women prisoners. I would like to direct my questions to Wendy Sinclair-Gabin and Dr Katrina Morrison. It's nearly 10 years on from the Daily Changelini's report on women offending. We seem to have made little, if any, progress in terms of women prison numbers. Earlier this month, the total female population was 290, including 93, remand prisoners. We know that women are very often victims of abuse, have experienced trauma and we know of the disruption that this causes to families. I wonder if you could comment on why the numbers are still so high. Why do you think that the numbers are still so high? Are alternatives to custody not being used enough and maybe just try and highlight why we don't seem to have made a lot of progress in this? It's a delightful question and it's something that has exercised the inspectorate for some considerable time. When you walk into a women's prison and I can strongly urge that you all do so, you will find caring and compassionate staff determined to work on a trauma informed approach and manage the women as best as they can within that parameter. That's not an issue. What stands out when you walk around is the number of women who exhibit or apparently mentally unwell. What is clear to me is that if we had a presumption of liberty around women, particularly where they are doing a good job caring for their children, that the number of women coming into custody would not be so high. If we could also transfer those mentally unwell women to inpatient care where they are waiting for a bed more rapidly, that would also reduce the number of women coming into custody. You have to look at the remand figures, although they are not anything like as shocking as the children's one. May I say that I absolutely agree with Bruce Adamson that the time to strike is now, not four years down the road. We need to get children out of young offender institutions. Aside from that, in terms of women, 26 per cent of them are on remand, and about 70 per cent don't go on to receive a custodial sentence, so it beggars the question, beggars belief, why they are actually in there anyway. However, I would strongly urge the committee to visit Cornton Vale. You will find compassionate and caring staff determined to try and do a good job. There is no question about that, but the level of mental health will appall you. Thank you for the question. It has also been an issue that we have been raising for a long time at Herod League Scotland. We know, of course, that the women in custody are especially vulnerable. I think that there was another written submission that highlighted the number of women with head injuries that have been received, I think, mostly through domestic violence as well. As Wendy also says, the staff do their very best, but it is clear that prison is not the right place for these women at all. Most of them also have been sentenced for non-violent offences, and, as Wendy also says, many of them are on remand. In terms of the reasons why we keep having the numbers of women in custody that we do, despite we have had numerous reports dating—well, there was the Angelini commission and before that, there were others as well. That is not new. It may well be that some sentences feel like prison is a place of safety for these people or a place where they can receive care. It may be that that is because there are not enough places in secure healthcare settings for them, which would be more appropriate. It may be because they do not know of other alternatives. We need to be mindful of the temptation to say that we need to create more non-custodial alternatives. We will get on to that later, but we know from the work of Professor McNeill that they have tended to increase alongside the prison population. We need to be thinking about more systematic diversion away from the system, either at the stage of prosecution or sentencing. We know that diversion has been very effective for young people, which we will discuss later on. It could be that, for women, that would be very useful. I have a brief follow-up to those answers, and thank you for those who are very helpful. Has there been any research done among the judiciary or sheriffs who are sentencing women as to their reasons for giving them custodial sentences? Do they feel that there is not enough care in the community for them? It would be good to know what percentage is in there, because, as you say, it is thought to be a safe environment, which seems contradictory. Do you know if any research on that has been done in the past or will it be done in the future? There is no research looking at the views of sentencing women specifically that I know of. One of the things that we have highlighted in our written submission is the lack of engagement in policy discussions from the judiciary. We absolutely support the principle of judicial independence and we want to uphold that, but we cannot have a discussion about prison's policy without them being round the table when it comes to remand, when it comes to sentencing children or women or, indeed, sentencing anyone. We really need to hear from them as well. That is one of our frustrations, which is that we do not have that evidence, I am afraid. That is my finished convener, unless anyone else wants to come in. Anybody else before we move on? No, thank you very much for that. I would like now to move on to some questioning around the modernisation of the prison estate. I will bring in Jamie Greene, if I may, and then I will bring in Pauline McNeill after that. I will try to stick to that general theme, but I have some specific questions. I would really like to interrogate Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons. I thank you for your written submission. It was quite stark, I thought. The first page was painted a rather grim picture of Scottish prisons. We talked about overcrowding, high levels of substance abuse, mental health challenges and what is described as a fragile origin organisation with ageing infrastructure and other critical inspections. Given what we now know about the endemic problem of drugs and substance abuse in Scottish prisons, is it the case that we have simply got this wrong in Scotland? We have high remand rights, we have one of the highest incarceration rights in Northern Europe and prisons in Scotland seem to be a revolving door of drugs, reoffending and poor mental health outcomes. What are we getting so wrong? Thank you for that question. I am afraid that this is a bit of a hobby horse for me. I think that the concept that punishment and prohibition work has never been proven, and that the concept of punishment and prohibition of substance misuse is simply not working. The cycle of reoffending is huge, the distress to families is huge, the difficulties within the community are huge. I have absolutely welcomed a fair number of reports recently, particularly Dame Carol Black, which says that we need to look at substance misuse as a public health agenda. I just think that we have got it wrong, but we will need to undertake significant change, to change that whole concept around, to look at rehabilitation, to look at support in the community and to remove the presumption of punishment as a way out of it. In other words, offending related to substance misuse that is not violent, domestic, violent or sexual should not go to prison. It should instead be seen as a public health agenda with considerable support in the community. That requires a significant shift in how we in Scotland deal with substance misuse. From the beginning, when we look at the availability of safe rooms for injecting, where we look at the possibility of community support, and all the way through to a change in the prison rules, where we will not punish people for relapsing. The way I look at it is that I have a complete addiction to chocolate. I have never succeeded in all my life in overcoming that addiction. Why do we assume that punishing people will help them overcome an addiction to a drug is beyond me? I think that we need to rethink our entire strategy. The quote that you made is that the choice is stark. We either put fewer people in prison or we recognise that we have to pay for the prison population that we already have. We know that we are not putting fewer people in prison. Does that mean that we are not paying for the prison population that we have? That follows on from my colleague's question. We gave around 8,000 prisoners a mobile phone for incel use during the pandemic, and there were obvious reasons for that. Those mobile phones were supposed to be unhackable. Why are so many of them being used to buy drugs and prisons? That question is directed at Ms Medhurst. Yes, thanks very much, Mr Greene. I saw the programme from Berlinnie. What I would say is that at the start of the pandemic, particularly the lockdown, we went into a period of time when it was uncertain how long families would not have access to people in custody. We had never faced a situation like that previously. There has always been physical visits arranged for people in custody. That was unprecedented. We needed to, at pace, identify other means by which people could maintain family contact, not just to ensure that families who were incredibly concerned and scared for the wellbeing of their loved ones in custody could be reassured, but also for the mental health of those in custody. The two options that were identified were mobile phones and virtual visits. At the time, there were strict security criteria that we had to apply and do so at pace with a provider. We implemented mobile phones in around four months. That is unprecedented. You would never do that in normal times, but those were unusual and unprecedented times that we were facing. Since then, we are aware of some of the areas of vulnerability and we are working to look at other potential solutions and have continued to look at our internal security measures as well as technological solutions to minimise the risks that exist. I think that that was a very good answer, which explained the rationale behind the policy, but it did not quite answer my question. My question is why were so many hacked. The obvious next question is what will be done about it. Are those 7,600 prisoners being allowed to keep those devices, knowing that many of them—hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them—are being broken and used for illicit purposes in your prison estate? Sorry if I did not answer your question specifically. I alluded to the fact that we have security measures in prisons. That is why we are able to identify phones that have been tampered with and where those phones have been tampered with. There are arrangements to ensure that we apply whatever an appropriate degree of punishment and withdrawal, depending on the circumstances in which the nature of the tampering has occurred. Obviously, going forward, what we need to do is ensure that any of those risks can be minimised and appropriate additional measures put in place. We also work specifically on drugs and illicit drugs coming into prisons, but we work closely with Police Scotland colleagues, particularly around serious organised crime, in order to ensure that all those risks are minimised and managed as best we can. I thank you for clarifying that. The theme was about modernisation of the prison estate. The premise of how we get prison numbers down and what type of prisons do we build and how do we best use public money to ensure that the prisons are places that people can come out of adequately rehabilitated and suitably ready for transition back into the community, which I think is something that everybody wants. Does any of the panel have a view on that? There are some submissions on what we should do. There is a limited amount of public money. There were some announcements in the programme for government, specifically around capital spend on the prison estate, but we know, for example, that HMP Greenock or Dumfries are old Victorian buildings, which claim that they are reaching human rights simply by the nature of their physicality. What does the Scottish Government need to do, or what do you need the Scottish Government to give you to ensure that the prison estate and the general prison environment is one that is conducive to getting those numbers down and getting criminals back on the straight and narrow? That is an open question to any of the panel. Perhaps you can use the chat function. Can I suggest, just in the spirit of timekeeping and also just keeping to our themes if possible, that Professor McNeill, you have been quite keen to come in on this? Is there perhaps an opportunity to bring you in? Thank you very much, convener. The obvious answer to the question is to say that prisons are a spectacularly bad, or they offer a spectacularly bad return on investment if you are trying to invest in crime reduction. Prisons, by virtue of imprisoning people, tend to de-habilitate them, to incapacitate them, to disable them and to disintegrate them. When you invest in prisons to try to improve rehabilitation and reintegrating people that go through them, you are spending money to recover from harm that you have created in the first place. Punishment is not a smart response to the kind of social problems that have already been discussed in this hearing. Problems related to physical and mental health, head injury, substance misuse, the solutions to none of those problems are going to be found in prisons. Rather, prison staff and prison leaders and prison managers are going to have to struggle against the grain of what imprisonment does to people in order to produce any positive effects. Prison strip people of liberty, of status, of responsibility, of the capacity to act, of the ability to develop as human beings and of social connections. Those are the things that help people to move away from offending and address many of the social problems that are often associated with offending. We need to radically rethink how we are spending public resources. When we revert to punishment because we are a liberal democracy and consider ourselves a civilised nation, we have to create a huge and complex system that applies due process protections before we impose punishment. If we put a much smaller number of people through that system and instead spent the money that we are spending making decisions and then controlling people on providing help to people with social problems, we would begin to get a significant return on investment. I think that any criminologist would tell you that if you want to reduce crime, you invest way upstream of the criminal justice system. When you invest in criminal justice, you invest in diversion at every possible turn. Thank you very much, Mr Greene. Have you got any other questions? My other question is about parole, but it is not on the steam, so I am happy to come back in if you can allow me. I think that we had some earlier questioning around the issue of drugs and prisons. I think that what I would quite like to do is just quickly jump back to that and allow members to ask some further questions on that. Then we will return to the issue around modernisation for a couple of final questions. If I may, I would like to bring in Mr Finlay again. This is another question for Teresa Methurst. We all understand the reasons for introducing those mobile phones. We understand the incredible logistical challenge in doing so at PACE. In the ITV news report, one prison officer said that those supposedly tamper-proof devices were hacked, and I quote directly, within hours of their arrival in Berlin. Did you or any of your staff raise this with the Scottish Government? If so, what consideration was given with disclosing those serious problems to Parliament and or the public? Thank you very much for your question, Mr Finlay. We have, I suppose, over the last year—it has probably been about a year since we introduced mobile phones—continuously looked to identify where there were vulnerabilities and seek technological solutions to minimise those vulnerabilities, and worked through that process between ourselves and colleagues in Police Scotland with our technological provider, as well as ensuring that, as we have moved along this journey, clearly there has been sight of some of those difficulties shared with the Scottish Government. Some of that is clearly operational issues for us to deal with. I talked about the security measures that we put in place, both for monitoring purposes and to ensure that we are able to identify when phones have been tampered with and therefore withdraw them. Other matters clearly are more policy-related, which are Government-related, on whether or not that kind of service would be continued and on what kind of sheet that would be continued, whether or not the continuation of something like the mobile phones would be preferred over something that was much more technologically focused, I suppose. We have much more ability to restrict them. This has been a learning process for us, as we have experienced it over the last year. Much of that learning will now be used to inform how best we take the next steps forward as an organisation, and we will do that in conjunction with Scottish Government colleagues. One more question on that issue. It is worth pointing out that the vulnerable prisoners are often targeted by the 600 prisoners who are marked as being members of organised crime groups. Given the security issues that you referred to earlier in response to the question from my colleague Jamie Greene, I spoke with Peter Smith about some of the other stuff that was not broadcast. What he tells me is that the prisoners are now smuggling in seals, which allow them to tamper with the phone and then reseal it, which means that, on inspection, the staff have no way of knowing that it has been tampered with. Is there any way that you can get the bottom of this or quantify how many phones have been compromised? That is not information that I have available at the moment, Mr Finlay. Obviously, I understand that Mr Smith conducted a number of conversations while he was in Berlin. The availability of different means and methods of serious organised crime infiltrates not just our country, but our prisons are clearly significant. That is why we have such close working relationships with colleagues in Police Scotland and work with them fairly intensively around some of the threats and vulnerabilities that that poses within our prison system. The dynamics of drugs not just in prisons, but in the country as well, are changing rapidly. Clearly, it is becoming much more and ever more sophisticated. It is really important for us to ensure that we are as forward-facing as we possibly can. That is why we work with a range of experts and organisations to help us to better understand the issues around drugs and the problem of drugs in prisons, as well as the measures that we need to take in order to minimise those risks. If there are no more questions from you, Mr Finlay, I will pull the discussion back to Ms McNeill. You were still looking to ask some questions around the modernisation of the estate. Thank you, convener. That probably would be to Theresa Mayter. The largest prison in the prison estate in Berlin has had some refurbishment through the years. I have been there visited a few times before it was refurbished. I was a bit surprised that it has taken so long for the replacement to come around, given the importance of Berlin to Glasgow in the west of Scotland, a prison that was meant to house mainly short-term prisoners. I saw from the same piece that was referred to earlier in SdV that it continually overcapacitated. We cannot possibly meet any of aspirations that we talked about earlier, unless it is the modernisation of prisons. I just wondered if you could talk me through. I believe that it is 2024-25 before we see completion of it. I should say that I had put in a pq on that. I am still waiting for an answer, because it seems to me to be quite a delay between what I know took some time to secure the land on it. I just wondered if you could speak to why it takes so long. I wonder if you agree that there is an imperative to replace Berlin's prison as soon as possible? I think that that was for Ms Methurst, am I correct? Yes, that was to the chief executive group. I think that we have perhaps lost Ms Methurst. Mr Purdy, would you be able to pick that up while we try to get Ms Methurst back? Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for the question. I think that I referred to Fergus McNeill's point further down the line. The idea would be to stop people into prison and stop us building a new prison in Glasgow for 1,200 people. However, in terms of the date, it is in relation to us being able to secure the land, as you absolutely rightly said. Receive the capital money to do that. The design stage has already started. The discussion was in the collaboration with our partners about what it needs to be. Part of that overall will be delivered in Glasgow. That is what is taking the time. The land has been there, the money is now available and we will move that forward as quick as we can. We will go on to the design and then through to construction to 2025-26. That is my question. Why is it taking so long? Is that just how long it takes to build a prison? It just seems an extraordinary long time table. That means that from 2021 to its five-year period that we are still going until we have been in prison less people, we are going to have a large prison in the estate, which is overcapacity, taking the wrong prisoners, because it is meant to be a short-term prison. It is taking long-term prisoners. We are not able to get people out themselves. Why is the explanation for why it would take to 2026? I thought that it was 2025, but now you are saying that it is 2026. I think that the first thing is to get the capital money to be able to build it. You are able to build a prison in three to four years from design to construction to opening it, and I think that it is secure in the capital funding to be able to do that. That allows us then to move that forward in the timeframe that we have just discussed. So you have got the money, but it takes three to four years to design and build a prison? Yes. That is your evidence. When we built Kilmarnock prison in Addiewell, it took four years to complete. Would that be right? It takes us three years at least to get it ready, to get it designed, to be able to then have it constructed, then open it and then mobilise. So you are talking about a three to four-year period to do that? I am sorry to dwell on this. Obviously, I do not know anything about it, but I know a little bit about the design of prisons, because I do remember the design of Addiewell, Kilmarnock, and how they changed it, making it easier for prison officers, lines of sight and all that. Is that the case up and down the country then, to take three years to design a prison? That would be the same in England or Wales? No. Things can happen simultaneously, so you then have to appoint a contractor, you have to get planning permission, you then have the design agreed, you then have that discussion along with the partners about what the establishment needs to do, and then you start the construction phase, and the construction phase typically takes 18 months after that, then you have the mobilisation. They actually bring the people in, so it takes that period to do that. That is our experience from building and opening low-morse prison in Bishop Briggs, and building, designing, opening the prison in Grampian up in the north-east. I am going to bring in Collette Stevenson now, and after that I would like to bring in Wendy Sinclair just to see if there are any final comments that you would like to make. So, Collette Stevenson. Thanks, convener, and good morning to each and all of you, and thanks for all your really good submissions. I really want to touch on what Pauline McNeill was commenting on about the prison and the modernisation of it. It would be remiss of me not to ask the question about going forward, the actual building itself in terms of sustainability and climate change, and whether that is something that has been a part of the talks in terms of where we go forward, we borrow any as well, and being a more sustainable building if that is something that is being discussed and how that is going to look going forward. There is an asset on the next zero committee, so it was mentioned by Michael Matheson, the cabinet secretary yesterday. One of the comments that was made, I suppose the buzzword that they are using is prosumer, so it is producer, consumer in terms of energy and energy efficiency. So, I would be keen to know that. The other thing as well is, when Pauline McNeill talked about basically the overcapacity in Berlin, having been an independent prison monitor up in HMP shots previously, one of the biggest requests that I actually got was to do with progression. So, the majority of people within HMP shots was high tariff prisoners who were wanting to progress down the prison estate, and the problem that they had, obviously, was overcapacity in Berlin, but equally being able to get on to the rehabilitation programmes that are available for them. So, I would probably put that out to Mr Purdy, and if Theresa is back on there as well, thanks. Mr Purdy, would you like to respond? I don't know if Theresa was going to pick that up, but thanks very much for your question. The progression pathway has been impacted by the coronavirus, and the continued number of long-term prisoners that come in through the local prison at Berlin and then progress through the shots is a consistent pipeline. That creates a backlog of people who can then move themselves on to the rehabilitative programmes to then start their journey towards the semi-open estate and to the open estate that we have, Opik Castle Huntley. It is trying to match the dates that are critical for people for the release and for the review through the parole board to make sure that they can do that fairly and consistently, and something that does feel unfair to someone who comes in that has been in custody for a while and somebody comes in later with a critical date that overtakes that, because they have a review in quicker, and they would progress forward and have an opportunity to participate in the programme before someone else. What's that backlog? It has been a problem there before in the pandemic, because that's actually just concentrated that problem. Sorry, is Theresa not with us? Sorry. She's back. Would you like to just pick that up quickly, Ms Metters? The two things that were asked, Ms Stevenson, one was about sustainability going with the new bills, and I'd like to reassure you that we do look at all aspects of our new bills in relation to sustainability, card and zero, et cetera, and make sure that we are connected into new developments, new technologies and new requirements in legislation, so we're trying to feature proof as best we can as part of our planning and projections. Secondly, the issue around progression, as Allie's rightly pointed out, there are issues with progression that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but there are wider considerations for progression than just prisoner programmes, and we have risk management schemes in each establishment that consider the wider risk issues and the risk profile of the individual and take that into account as part of that person's progression journey. Thank you very much, Ms Metters. I think, Ms Mackay, you've got a couple of questions that you would like to bring in, and then I'll bring in Wendy Sinclair after that. Thank you, convener. Yes, it's a question to Theresa Metters, please, and it's probably to Alistair Purdy, as well. It's around the temporary and permanent arrangements for the Covid challenges that you've had in a previous session, Ms Metters said, that family video contact would be continued when we finally get through the pandemic, which is very welcome. I'm wondering if there's any other, if you could expand on that, if there's any other measures being taken. I know that the organisation families outside are very keen to have the best possible use of technology, for instance, so that a parent can go to a parent night, etc. If you could expand on that, and I'll just tag on my second question so that you could maybe roll them into one. The other one is about the women's custody units, and I'm very much welcome those. We know about the importance of attachment between mothers and babies, and I'm just wondering if, within those units, there will be any planned mother and baby units. I'm not sure if you've got that scoped yet or not, so if you could maybe answer those two. Thank you very much. The issues around the Covid challenges and our on-going use of technology, there is a digital strategy that we are working on at the moment to increase and enhance both the technological capacity for staff to free up time for them, then on the relationships that are so critical and important in supporting rehabilitation and motivating those in custody to take on board the opportunities that are available to them, but also to expand the range of opportunities for those in custody to access a wider range of supports through technological solutions, and clearly the most important one of those will be through access to families, so that is a critical and central part of that strategy going forward. Secondly, on the community custody units, the community custody units have been designed in a very flexible way to ensure that we have the ability to support a range of different needs, which would include mothers and babies as well, because then being close to their home is critically important. The potential for that to happen has been designed into the facilities that are being developed and built as we speak. I will follow up briefly with that. What probability is that going to happen? Potentials there, but will it happen? I am thinking more on overnight and stays and things like that, because surely that would greatly enhance mental health of the women that would be there and would help with a lot of their problems. Is that something that you think is actually going to happen? I would strongly suggest that we would be failing if it did not happen, but I think that what I would have to say is that we need to be clearly understanding of some of the issues and the factors that play in smaller residential units, ensuring that we take account of everyone's needs in those units, as well as, obviously, those broader family needs. As we always do with children and the ability for children to spend time with their mothers in particular and overnight, we would look at each case on an individual basis and assess it, then identify how best to meet the individual's needs, particularly the points that were made earlier around the rights of a child, so that we need to take a licence of that, absolutely. Just before we move on, and I am quite keen to move on as quickly as we can, I have still got a wee bit to get through. Wendy Sinclair, if there are any final comments that you would like to make on that? Yes, gladly. In terms of progression, I think that it is worth the committee knowing that HMIPS has undertaken a thematic review on progression, which is basically what happens to people as they walk through their prison journey. I have full co-operation from the Scottish Prison Service, Service Management Authority, the Parole Board, and I think that we will be able to address some of the issues, find the underlying causes and come up with some recommendations that can resolve that going forward. Mr Pardee is exactly right in that the problems existed, to some degree, before Covid, but were extremely exacerbated by Covid. I would also like to say, on substance misuse, that I would really like the committee to look at the evidence around diversion, deep penalisation, all of those issues that will help us to reduce the population and hopefully make the replacement of greener condom freeze and even barlinny unnecessary, which would be my dream. Finally, I absolutely agree with Bruce Abaddonson that we need to get the children that are in prison at the moment out. That does not mean that they do not have to be in secure care. It simply means that they should not be in the prison, and I think that the committee needs to urgently think through and look at the evidence of that. I am really pleased that there is an afternoon session on that. I am going to move on, if I may. We have just got about 20 minutes left, so again I would ask members and witnesses if they could keep their questions and responses as succinct as possible. I would like us now to focus on the parole system, and I will bring in Mr Finlay again just to start our questioning around that. It is a question for Mr Watt, and I should declare an interest in that I have recently submitted objections to a prisoner being released who is in custody for attacking myself. In the first line of your submission, you describe the parole board as Scotland's parole court. Can you tell us how the public can attend these courts? The public can't attend parole hearings. The parole boards are court for very narrow parole purposes. The parole rules, as they presently stand, tend to mitigate against public attendance at large. However, are those in an interest in parole victims, for example, who can attend and others can attend for educational purposes or developmental purposes, but it would really need a change in the rules to allow wider access to the public at large? That is my answer. I would like to be at that point. I am going back to that point. There is perhaps a perception that anonymous middle-class professionals such as you and I decide the fate of dangerous individuals being returned to the type of communities that we tend not to live in. If sentencing is quite rightly transparent, why is there not transparency around the actual time served? Has the parole board had any discussion with the Scottish Government about moving in this direction? I do not quite understand the question. In terms of the public, as things stand, have no means of knowing when individuals are granted parole? Is there any move involving the parole board and the Scottish Government to change that and bring in increased transparency? The parole board's view is that there is no reason why the lease on parole ought not to be made public. For the sake of transparency, I would be quite content to have limited information, perhaps, available on the website or the board's website, covering that kind of thing, unless it had security or safety implications. There will be cases where you might have to be careful, but otherwise I see no reason, resources permitting, why that should not happen. That is good to know. Thank you. In the second part of your question about discussions, the Management of Offenders Act 2019 restricted itself to information being provided where release in life cases was granted, which is quite a narrow band of publicity, if you like. A very limited number of cases also required complete anonymity. That is the law, so we apply it. I will bring in Mr Greene now, and then I would like us to move on to looking at care of prisoners. Thank you. I have a supplementary question to the line of questioning on parole. I indicated to have a separate question on alternatives to custody, but I am happy to keep that if we have time, because we have not really discussed that as a panel today. We know that numbers on the victim notification scheme are dropping year on year. At the moment, that is an opt-in service, but it is clear. I note very vividly from the submission from the Pro Board for Scotland that the word victim was not mentioned once in your paper. Is not that the root of the problem here, in that the entire submission is primarily centred around how we make parole better for those involved in the hearings, i.e. those in prison, and no mention is made by anyone in their submissions about how we better improve the victim notification scheme proactively, so that we are telling those who are affected by those serious crimes that the people who have perpetrated them are now backing out in the street, so that they are not bumping into them in the queue in the supermarket? The board is committed to providing as much information as possible to victims. I am due to appear before a round table next Wednesday, and there is a very lengthy paper consisting of six pages about the parole board's desire to assist victims as far as possible for the next hearing. However, the focus of this hearing was not on victims. I am very happy to talk about victims and how we would like to support them. We go above and beyond what statutory requirements we have. We arrange for attendance of victims at a hearing, or some considerable time ago, now at Greenock, before there was ever a statutory requirement, and we did it in person. I chaired that particular tribunal. It is perhaps unfair to castigators for not mentioning victims when we are scheduled to do that next week. However, if you have some specific questions, I am happy to deal with them, but the board has to be as open as it possibly can be to provide victims with as much information as it can, as much support as it can. Whether it does it directly or through other, perhaps better, qualified bodies is an open question. However, I agree with the sentiment of your question of victims. I must understand what is happening. I am sure that we will have that discussion in due course at a future panel. I look forward to reading your paper. I am quite keen, if we may, to move on to looking at care of prisoners and death in custody. In that regard, I will bring in Ms Stevenson to start that off. Again, I had previously alluded to the fact that I was an independent prison monitor, and one of the things that we inspected was the NHS and the health of prisoners. One of the other things that stood out for me when I went down to visit the healthcare suite in shots was that most prisoners were allocated their prescription drugs on a Friday, which was quite concerning, because it led to a lot of them sharing it. They were locked up over the weekend as well, with very little in the way of purposeful activity. There were no educational facilities over the weekend as well. It became a currency and effect for changing drugs or swapping drugs and whatnot. The other thing was that it risked overdose for some people who were suffering from varying degrees of mental health. One of the things that the Minister for Drug Prevention, Angela Constance, mentioned was a slow release injection that can be given by the NHS. What I would like to know from Wendy, and I think probably Theresa as well, is has that changed? If so, is the NHS still giving it dispensing drugs on a Friday, literally in the afternoon? Is there any way that that can be changed? The other thing as well is that there is no risk to the prison population in terms of overdoses and getting involved in the currency and the challenges that are faced with drugs and prisons. That is an interesting question. It is important to mention that the drug that you mentioned by injection is buvidal. Basically, it is highly regarded by both the prisoners and the staff because it does remove that risk of being bullied out of your drugs or when you leave prison not having it stolen as you leave the prison. We view buvidal as a good success story, if you like. There are problems. Prisoners tell us the fog that comes with the methadone in their brains. They feel that that has lifted under buvidal. All in all, it is a success story. Drugs in prison is a major, major issue. When I talk about revising the prison rules, one of the things that needs to happen is a reduction of the drugs coming in through the post in almost undetectable quantities. The prisons are phenomenal at detecting and preventing drugs when you look at the reports of how much they stop getting into prison. It is amazing. For instance, for example, the novel psychoactive drugs can go on paper if they can forge a solicitor's letter on paper, soak it in drugs that can then be put in the kettle and sent out. You have got a real problem. By changing the prison rules, we can prevent at least all legal letters coming in by post, and we can actually look at perhaps photocopying prisoner letters. However, you are always playing a catch-up game with drugs. You know that from being an IPM. It is a major problem in prison. It is a major problem stopping it coming in. It is a major problem providing support and rehabilitation to prevent people wanting to take drugs. I know that it is a huge issue for the prison service. The recovery model is something that you will find that the afternoon's committee can discuss at length as well, but it needs to move to a recovery model. Thank you very much, Mr Stevenson, for the question. I think that we are aware, and so you will know from your time as an IPM, different means and mechanisms by which arrangements are made to ensure that either people who are vulnerable from having in-person medication, then different arrangements are made for them. However, the assuring the slow release buvidal, as Wendy says, definitely has got much more potential to minimise both the risks to individuals as well as ensuring that people can be better supported on that recovery journey. When Wendy is right and anecdotally the information coming back is that people are much more able to focus on rehabilitation and release in a way that they find difficult with methadone when they are on methadone. If you are asking, has it changed? I mean, there is still an awful lot of prescribed medication that goes out in prisons every single day, and it very much drives how we operate our prisons because of the amount of time that that takes. It really would be for health service and the NHS to speak to this, but anything such as buvidal, we would really welcome warmly, both in terms of making more time available for rehabilitation and also ensuring that those risks can be minimised. In terms of recovery and the arrangements that Wendy was referring to, psychoactive substances have been a game changer, I think, for everyone. The methods and means by which people can traffic those are quite well known for the most part, but it is being able to put in place and we are currently considering other measures that we can take particularly around mail coming into prisons so that we can minimise those risks as much as possible. Thank you very much indeed. Anything else you would like to pick up on? No, I wanted to maybe touch upon the mail in terms of electronic mail and that you can now email a prisoner rather than a hard mail coming through. I suppose that that depends on the volume as well and just how much that is getting used, but I am conscious of that as well at the time, so it is something that I could maybe write to you about and ask if that is okay. Thank you very much for those responses. Can I bring in Fulton MacGregor? I know that you were quite keen to ask some questions around purposeful activity in prisons and the transition phase into the community. Mr MacGregor? Actually, Fergus McNeill touched on my area of question earlier. I know that he has been waiting from the chat to come back in, so I will give him an opportunity here. I would like to say from the outset that I concur completely with what he said earlier in terms of where the balance should be as we move forward in terms of the society that we want to become. I suppose that my question for panellists starting with Mr McNeill is what can the impact be of rehabilitation services within prisons, whether that is those that the prisons provide, or those that are outsourced, if you like, either to third sector organisations or local authority workers or NHS workers? What impact do you think that the Covid-19 pandemic has had in this, particularly the outsourcing of services? That is quite a broad question. Sorry, do you mean me to come in on that now, first of all? Yes. If you want to come in first, I know that you have been looking to come back in anyway, Professor, so you can bring in any other points that you wanted to raise. I will try to be very brief, but I will put on the record what I put on the chat was a sense of frustration that when we talk about modernising the prison estate and responding to problems like problems with mobile phones or problems with psychoactive substances, it feels to me as if we are talking about redecorating the house and buying new furniture when a structural engineer has told us that the foundations are collapsing. If you read the submissions to the committee carefully enough, you will see in them that there is lots of criticism of the foundations on which our system is built, having made that point and put it on record. Obviously, rehabilitation in prison is really difficult, and the evidence about rehabilitative programmes is that they work better in the communities than in prisons. There is an obvious reason for that. You can try to learn something in an institutional environment, but the first thing that you have to do when you are released is transfer the learning to a new context. That is difficult for social work students on placements or medical students moving from universities to hospitals. The transfer of learning is a complicated activity, and prisoners are not well supported in that transition to take the learning from inside out into the community. One way in which we can ease with the transfer of learning is by ensuring that it happens through partnerships with outside organisations. Clearly, criminal justice social work and the third sector educational institutions and health services have a huge role to play there. The short answer is that if we are to try to rehabilitate in prisons, which I think is not the best strategy, but if we are to try to do it in prisons, we have to do it through developing partnerships. If you overcrowse prisons, you cannot provide meaningful rehabilitation. The Committee for the Prevention of Torture tells us repeatedly that our prisons are overcrowded. We cannot dress this up in any different way. We do not rehabilitate prisoners well, and we do not prepare them for release well, and we do not support them on release well. It is because our system is chalk a block with people who should not be in it. That is the first and fundamental problem that we need to address, but I will shut up and let others in after saying that. Thanks, Professor. Before I come to a couple of others who have put ills in the chat box, I completely agree with that. I think that we are sending too many people to prison currently, and I think that there is definitely a job of work that we have done, but I am also consciously aware that this particular session is on the prison estate so on. I wanted to come to Alan and maybe talk about how the pandemic has impacted work that has been able to take place in prisons, whether that is what prisons provide to themselves or the external people coming in. Thank you for that question. It has been very, very interesting in terms of how a lot of organisations have responded to this through changing to remote forms of working through to variations on gate liberation work and so forth, but you cannot deny that access has been the key thing. The face-to-face relationship building, which is essential, has been the key loss over this whole Covid period, getting access. We talk about rehabilitation and perhaps we forget that the single most important factor in rehabilitation is hope. If you do not have hope, there is not a lot of point in rehabilitating. In order to create hope, you have to have a pathway, you have to have some sense that there is a life, there is a future outside of the prison. We cannot afford to continue to keep treating prison as some subset of humanity or a silo on its own. It is part of a journey, and the third sector has been very, very efficient and effective in creating an in-reach process, but that is nowhere near complete. It is nowhere near available everywhere. Funding has been a particular issue, and committee members may or may not be aware that, at the beginning of next year, the European social funding stops. European social funding has been the one source of funding that has allowed organisations like ours to work specifically with people with additional needs, for instance, people with sexual offence records and a domestic violence group of the prison population. That group of people has not been recognised by the additional responses that we need to put in place to allow them to transition safely and effectively into the community. The third sector is capable of doing a lot of this work. We just need to be involved. I know that we are running out of time. I think that those two other people wanted to come in. I wonder if you could just pick up very briefly on the question that I raised and perhaps bring in. I know that Rona Mackay talked about it in the context of women's prisons, but in more general terms, the importance of family contact and rehabilitation and how that can be done safely and, at that point, I will ask a number of other questions in the interest of time. I will be as brief as possible. I absolutely agree with Fargus's point about rehabilitation in prison. It is not the place that we should be rehabilitating given that then, when you enter into the community, you are just trying to undo many of the damages that have been done by overcrowding. It is much, much harder to do anything positive in a context in which everything is overcrowded. I just wanted to make the point about work. There is a real opportunity in some ways with work at the moment and providing skills and potentially qualifications for people in custody in the context of the very significant labour shortages that there are. We all will have read about those. They currently exist in construction, joinery and catering, etc. With real concerted effort and partnership working with organisations and community partners, there is a potential here to allow people to gain the skills in sectors in which there are jobs in the future. That will certainly give them a lot of hope echoing Alan's point for the future. That work should be properly remunerated. There are many jurisdictions in which people in custody are paid properly for the work that they do. In Italy, it is also taxed, meaning that it generates revenue that can then go back into the system. The feeling of earning an income is something that can really help that individual as well. They can send some of that money back to their family and provide them hope for the future. There are lots of things to consider there in terms of work. I think that Mr Watt, if I may ask you to be as brief as you can, and then I will bring the session to a close. If I can just say briefly that the parole system in this country is wasteful, delays in rehabilitative programmes and the consequences after that evaluation permission to go into the community and waiting for a place in the open estate can potentially add two years to the point in time when a prisoner can realistically be considered for parole. That is two years in a cell where that is perhaps unnecessary. In echoing previous comments about community alternatives, we should be searching for proportionate ways to restrict liberty. That really means that there should be options in the community in which they are proportionate to the risk where a prisoner in a prison is perhaps not proportionate to the risk. That may well allow more prisoners to be released than fewer prisoners to be recalled into custody. However, without that proportionate restriction on liberty in the community, the choice is a binary one. It is either in the community or in jail, and that is inflexible and results in people being in prison who really shouldn't be there. I know that we probably did not get through a lot of the questions and responses that we would have liked to. I would extend an invitation to witnesses if you would like to raise any outstanding points with the committee. Please feel free to contact us in writing, and we will take your evidence into account. I extend my thanks to all our witnesses today. Thank you very much for your contributions, and we will now take a short five-minute break before we hear from our next set of witnesses. Our next agenda item is a round-table discussion about reducing youth offending, offering community justice solutions and alternatives to custody. I refer members to papers 5 and 6. We will take evidence today from a round-table of witnesses who will be joining us virtually. I am sorry that you cannot join us in person, but that is due to the current rules around social distancing. I warmly welcome our panel of witnesses this morning. We have Ms Fiona Dyer, interim director of the Children's and Young People's Centre for Justice, Ms Gemma Fraser, senior reporting officer, recovery, renewal and transform, Community Justice Scotland, Ms Ashley Cameron, the Promise Scotland oversight board member, the care review, Superintendent Colin Convery, partnerships, prevention and community well-being of Police Scotland, Ms Diane Dobby, Justice Standing Committee of Social Work Scotland, Professor Leslie MacCara of the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Hannah Graham, senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Stirling, and finally Mr Nivenrenny, director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit. We very much appreciate your time joining us this morning, and I thank those witnesses who have provided a written submission. Those are now available online. I intend to allow about an hour or so for questions and discussion. If witnesses wish to respond to a question, can I ask that you indicate that requests by typing an R in the chat function on blue jeans, and I will bring you in if time permits. If you are merely agreeing with what the witness is saying, there is no need to intervene to say so. Other comments that you make in the chat function will not be visible to committee members or recorded anywhere, so if you would like to make a comment, please do so by requesting to speak. We will now move directly to questions. Can I please ask members and our invited guests, as ever, to keep questions and comments as succinct as possible? I am very keen to encourage as free-flowing a discussion as I can. I would like to start off our question session this morning, and perhaps start with Gemma Fraser from Community Justice Scotland. I would like to bring in Fiona Dyer, if I may. Obviously, this morning, the Scottish Sentencing Council published a new guideline on the sentencing of young people. If it is approved, the guideline will apply to the sentencing of all those under the age of 25 years and will require the courts to consider rehabilitation issues and the availability of a range of non-custodial options. I appreciate that members and witnesses will not perhaps have had time—a great deal of time—to consider this. I was interested to ask a representative from Community Justice Scotland, in the first instance, if you welcome the report and what difference, if any, do you think that it will make? Can I start off with Ms Fraser? Yes, thank you very much. We would happily welcome what is being proposed today within Community Justice Scotland and for wider community justice delivery. For a long time, we have put forward the case that individuals are exactly that—that they are individual—and bring their own experiences to the table in terms of offending as the product of that. Wherever this can be considered and how they are sentenced for young people or across our adult population is a huge benefit. What it should do and support is the ability to access the correct services at the correct time in the system. The more community that we can put into justice, the better, because we already understand that networks, relationships and connection are what truly changes lives, and that is true of young people, as it is more so probably than any other. Where we can have more individuals within community orders as a result of that, with more access to education and those early supports, that is hugely welcomed, absolutely. Thank you very much. At this point, maybe I will bring in Ms Dyer just to make any further comments that you would like. Yes, thank you, convener. I echo what Gemma has just said there. We would welcome those changes in the proposals that are made, especially in relation to remittal to the children's hearing system. Currently, only an average of 7 or 8 per cent of children who appear in adult courts are remitted to the children's hearing system. As you will know, that system is a system where they can participate and their needs are taken into account. We would welcome that, especially, but also that young people, their needs are being recognised up to age 25. We know the evidence for brain development, and we know about the complexities that many young people in our justice system face, speech, language and communication needs, brain development, brain injury, and all the issues and promises that they have faced in their lives. For those to be taken into account when sentencing is being made, it is definitely a welcome decision. Thank you very much, Mr Dyer. I would like to ask a follow-up question, both to Ms Fraser and our brilliant Mr Dyer. Given the important principle of judicial independence, I am interested in what you think about how that will be implemented throughout Scotland and not perhaps applied only in a few areas or serfdoms. We have already seen from the work of Audit Scotland that sentencing data shows some geographical variation in the use of community sentences. For example, the number of CPOs per 10,000 population in 2019 to 2020 ranged from 16 in East Renfrewshire to 69 in Clackmannanshire. I am interested to start with Ms Fraser, if you have any commentary or response around that. It is important to note in terms of geographical variance that areas do not experience the same types of crime and offending and do not therefore meet the same responses. It is important to take those figures in a context of how many individuals are in custody, how many individuals are diverted, does get an earlier access to the system or could be brought closer into the system. Where we need to think about judicial impatiality is a hugely important thing in Scotland, and it should be preserved because it supports a system that is hugely admired across the world. However, how we ensure that not just the judiciary but the public have confidence in what is being delivered in communities is about our effective communication of what sits in underpins community justice. In order to ensure that those things come through and are not used in a small subset of individuals, we have to make sure that those lines of communication are open with our community justice deliverers but also the individuals who experience community sentences and the benefits that they receive from that. I think that that goes a long way to helping those things to be promoted and put into place at the right times. Certainly in community justice Scotland, we have supported an information project at the moment in order to achieve that, but it is also how we influence town office, defence agents and other individuals in thinking about decision making and what might be suitable for those individuals who receive it. Thank you very much. I will bring in Ms Dyer just now and I will bring in, following that, I will maybe ask Hannah Graham to come in. I agree again with what Gemma Graham said, although it is important that there are differences in decision making. We have seen that with some of the research that we have undertaken at the Children and Young People Centre for Justice in relation to bail and remand, supervised bail and what sentences believe are appropriate and how many chances some young people may or may not get. Hopefully, the census and guidelines will be supported by training. Potential guidelines for the judiciary so that we can involve some consistency in relation to decisions that are being made, because I think that that is also important. Thank you very much. Ms Graham, would you like to come in and then I will bring in, I am just trying to keep things moving smoothly, and then I will bring in Professor McHara after that. Ms Graham? Thank you, convener. The views that I am expressing in the round table today are as a criminologist who works in academia. I am not officially speaking for the Scottish Sentencing Council, but I should declare an interest that I hold a public appointment as a member of the Scottish Sentencing Council. In the panel of witnesses in the round table earlier and just now, many of the points that we would want to see raised have already been raised, and so the council development of the Sentencing Young People Guideline has been informed by a range of evidence. There has been research commissioned, there has been public and judicial consultation, and so the experience and the expertise not only of organisations and lived experiences such as those represented in the round table today, but a much wider range of groups, bodies, academics, members of the public have contributed towards this consultation. The points that I would add to what has already been said, and Gemma Fraser summarised some of the key issues and opportunities quite well, is that the guideline has been drafted quite carefully, not to limit judicial discretion, but to guide in determining an appropriate sentence. It requires sentences to consider the purpose of rehabilitation in Sentencing Young People, but it does not stop or preclude other sentencing purposes if they are relevant. If public protection is relevant or if punishment is relevant, the judiciary is not stopped or limited in considering those. If it is approved by the CAHI court, the guideline will apply to approximately 14,000 cases of young people per year, and there is a potential for an increase in community sentencing for particularly the age 21 to 24-year-old age group, as well as potentially more review hearings in courts. That would be an example where the judiciary might have imposed something like a community payback order and to encourage and monitor compliance. A person, a young person, might be brought back before the court with input from just the social work and relevant others to consider how they are complying with that order, because that could be a shorter order or it could be anywhere up to three years. This is encouraging more rehabilitative outcomes in the hope of reducing re-offending, which hopefully means fewer victims in the future. Victims groups and their representatives have also been part of the consultation, the engagement, and the research commissioned by the council. It has been a large undertaking, and if people would like to know more, there is a lot of information on our website, and an impactful assessment will be released after high court consideration. Professor McHara, would you like to come in? Thank you very much for inviting me to give evidence today. Most of my evidence is going to be based on the findings from our longitudinal study, the Edinburgh study of youth transitions and crime that Susan McVie and I have been running for the last 23 years. We have been following the same people for that period of time. They are now aged 35, so we have followed them since age 12, and we now have the beginning results of phase 8 of our study. Some of the things that I want to say are related to that longer-term information about people's journeys through life up to that age. I want to begin, first of all, by saying that, in 1992, my first job was in the Scottish Office as a researcher in evaluating the implementation of ring-fence funding for community justice, social work criminal justice services, with the ambition at that time that they would reduce short-term imprisonment. The policy in some levels was successful, but it was not successful in reducing the prison population. The principal reason for that was because sheriffs and judges continued to give short-term sentences feeling that they had no alternative and not feeling tremendously confident in community disposals. I absolutely welcome the Sentencing Council's recommendations and guidelines today. I absolutely welcome them, but the proof of the pudding will be if they are absorbed and followed by the sentence that people are able to sentence. That is one thing that is really important, that when we want to transform the prison population, when we want to transform what happens to people in Scotland, we have to think about what the judiciary is doing. Always accepting that we have to have an independent judiciary, but they are the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system in terms of disposals in the community or in prisons. That is one thing. Second of all, there is very compelling research. I know that it has been drawn to the committee's attention about brain development and neuro-science developments, looking at how children mature and how, up to age 24, the brain is still maturing. Therefore, because of those biological considerations, rehabilitation seems to be the most just approach to dealing with young people who come into conflict with the law. There are also other contexts of the lives of young people that mean that the court setting is simply not appropriate for 16 and 17-year-olds. Ten years ago, I also gave evidence to a justice committee about trying to extend, making sure that, although the hearing system can technically deal with 16 and 17-year-olds, it very rarely does, and trying to extend something, a different kind of venue to deal with children who come in conflict with the law at 16 and 17. I still think that that is absolutely needed. We have some of the most vulnerable children who make the transition into the adult system. They get up tarred very quickly, which is shown by our study, and the longer-term outcomes are very poor for them. The conundrum of how we manage older children in justice systems has yet to be solved by the Scottish system. I am going to ask Fulton MacGregor to come in now. He has a couple of general questions around violence reduction. I will then move on to looking at alternatives to custody, and I will bring in Rona Mackay. I have a general question from my own line of questioning. It is on the Scotland approach to youth offending. I wanted to ask from the violence reduction unit perspective what we can learn from that. I know that the work done by that team is absolutely fantastic, but what can we learn from that in terms of our approach to youth offending? I think that there are many positives in it. As someone who used to work in that sector, you would expect me to say that, but what can we learn from the violence reduction unit and its approach in terms of public health message and basis to our work? If I could start maybe with Niven Rennie, if that would be okay. I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you as well. A lot of things are involved in that. Personally, public health is a recognition that the answer to our problems does not lie with justice and the police alone. We all have to play a part. Many people start their journey into criminality, into violence, pre-birth and, best picking up on the last point, we know from work that we have done about adverse childhood experience and the impact that is growing up in us. I totally agree that interventions need to be earlier, and we need to try to keep people out of prison, because we have shown people who are working with people who work for me now, who have had a history of offending, who can turn their lives around in a couple of years and start taking other people out of that criminal justice journey. There is so much that I could talk about and go on through the rest of your time. I hope that that touches on some of the issues. I thank you for that. That is a very helpful oversight. I wonder if MDLs, maybe Superintendent Convery, if you wanted to take him in and perhaps expand on the points that are made by Niven about how important it is that we take into account all the different factors in the child welfare that are taken into account in dealing with youth offending and a human rights approach, as you have probably heard Bruce Adamson talk about in the previous panel. I thank you, Mr Ragger and the convener. From our perspective, I absolutely support the comments that Niven has offered on the trauma-based approach that we absolutely believe in as an organisation and something that we are working towards. That runs through all the legislative pieces that are developing just now in delivery to support youth justice, ranging from UNCRC incorporation, the promise, the vision of youth justice strategy at Age of Criminal Responsibility, et cetera. There are lots of moving parts and I think that that is a fantastic opportunity just now to try and pull things together. I do think that looking at the wider vision and the public health approach to things is absolutely the right way to support our young people. I am aware of the Senterson Council announcement this morning, which we would support, given the fact that it is about trying to underpin and undermine the challenges that young people are facing in their life to try to prevent the offending in the first place, and the fact that it is up to 25 recognised again the trauma-based aspect. I know that Niven has worked a lot on it, and that we would advocate it as the experienced aspects and engage in listening and understanding service users' perspectives and views, clearly about witnesses. One of the challenges that we face is balancing up that between justice and welfare and how we meet and manage community expectations to try and deliver and maintain confidence. I think that there is a lot. I absolutely agree with you that UNCRC offers huge opportunities and, as an organisation, we are totally committed to a rights-based approach. I would like to think that that is the direction that will go as an entity, and I am sure that Collector will work towards that. I can bring you in on that as well, but I am picking up on the point that was made there by supporting the contrary. That is an important issue in terms of some of our young people who are displaying the most challenging behaviour in our communities and are affecting their communities really badly. Often, some of them are most traumatised young people as well. If you could comment on how important that balance is, it has been referred to there in how we can get that right and make sure that welfare and human rights approach to our children is at the centre. Thanks for the opportunity to respond to that question. From my social work Scotland point of view, young people who are in conflict with the law really have on-made needs. Social Work Scotland would also acknowledge the research in relation to brain development, and the children and young people's brains are not fully developed until they are at the age of 25. Many young people who are on the edges of the justice system or involved in justice services have experienced some level of trauma or adversity in that they are all individuals. The whole system approach that was introduced in 2011 has already demonstrated some really good outcomes for some young people. The challenge is in relation to some of our older young people ensuring that they get the right help at the right time and that responses are proportionate, trauma-informed and that they are child-centred. Young people do not fare well in the adult justice system, so it is not at all possible that they are kept out of adult justice services through being remitted and through an effective intervention in the first instance through being remitted to the hearing to ensure that they get a multi-agency sort of child-centred approach and a plan that is responsive to their needs, that they are diverted from custody. For those young people who are posing a significant or imminent risk of harm, we use a child-centred response to that and that we do not put young people in custody and that we would, where possible, use secure. However, there are some legal barriers to the use of secure care at the present time, which I think have been acknowledged in some of the evidence that has been submitted. For over 18 years, they are still pretty young. The research evidences are not fully developed and are not fully mature. If they are on a community payback order, it is often a real challenge to get a young person like that to comply with that, because at times their maturity means that they are testing boundaries, they are taking challenges, they are taking risks. In order to support that, there needs to be a multi-agency flexible and responsive approach to supporting that young person, which involves all agencies who are involved with them. Some of the experiences that I have worked well or some of the interventions that I have worked well have probably been structured deferred sentencing approaches or young people who have been convicted of an offence but have not yet been sentenced. There is a level of flexibility in that, but they can also review courts on a regular basis where their progress is monitored. There is certainly flexibility in that to respond, and there is some evidence that there is been some positive outcomes for young people who have gained greater citizenship through that intensive support that is being delivered. I am happy with that in terms of general opening question, because I will do the question later. There are three people here working in, but I will return to you to decide whether that is appropriate or not at this stage, given the time. I would like to bring in Professor Macara again, followed by Fiona Dyer, just to pick up on this topic. One of the things that we should be celebrating in Scotland is the major reductions in young people aged 16 and 17 in custody. We could get that into zero, but it is very much lower than it was, since the introduction of the whole system approach, equally reductions in criminal convictions in 16 and 17-year-olds. There is a strong set of trends in the criminal justice statistics that are downward trends that are, in some degree, indicative of the diversionary approaches that are working. That is very pleasing for me, because our study, the Edinburgh study, was one of the pieces of evidence drawn on to give the Government confidence that it could do something like diversion and it would work. At some level, it is working. However, what those aggregate figures are disguising is something that I am sure that most people on this call are aware of, is that the system is now dealing with a smaller number of young people, but they are much more intensely vulnerable. It is an intensely vulnerable group, in particular the young people who end up in pole months. Therefore, they are absolutely the most challenging, the most difficult young people who are suffering from extremely difficult circumstances. In our study, we have been following the trajectory of our young people up to age 35, and we have been able to do what is called trajectory modelling, which is where we can look at different patterns of offending. We have a group of young people in our cohort, not many, who are on a very high level, chronic level of self-reported offending, who are intensely involved in offending. For many of the young people who become persistent offenders, whether it is serious offending or less serious offending, they come from the poorest backgrounds. The young people that we have in our cohort now, who are still having criminal convictions, a very small proportion, are intensely poor and intensely difficult backgrounds. One of the things that we often leave as the elephant in the room is poverty. Poverty underpins the lives of so many of the young people who get caught up in the justice system. We never deal with this problem holistically. We do not look in the round. We look at it in terms of the individual family, housing or jobs, but we never look at the whole of the way in which all of those are intersectional issues. Poverty is the thing that leads to chronic patterns of offending, which is very strongly predictive of chronic patterns of offending. It also is the thing that stops people from stopping offending. Most people desist from offending in their early 20s. What we see in this small group of people who continue to offend into their 30s is that they are trapped, trapped by poverty, trapped by poor skills, trapped by not having a strong education, trapped being excluded from school earlier on, and they cannot break free. Until we start thinking about rehabilitation and youth justice in that broader holistic concert, we will continue to see these highly vulnerable young people coming to the system. They are very difficult to support and help because the context in which they are living are the things that trap them and do not allow them to move on. I will bring in Fiona Dyer briefly if she would not mind and then we will move on. The difficulties that those children are facing—there are fewer of them in the system, which is great—is that their needs, especially for children up to 18, will be best met in the children's hearing system. In Scotland, what we need to do is look at our legislation, because we have so many contradictions in the legislation about who is a child and where their needs can be best met. That is why we have so many children in our adult court system. Ultimately, if we are going to be UNCRC-compliant, children should not appear in any adult court, and that is children up to age 18. At the moment, because a child is deemed as an adult if they are 16 and 17 and not open to the children's hearing or on compulsory supervision, those children, if they are needing to have their needs met in a secure environment, cannot be sent to secure care. They have to go to our young offenders' institution because of legislation. They are also, as I said earlier, the low numbers that are remitted to the children's hearing system. Ultimately, what we need in Scotland is a system where all children are treated as children and the children's hearing system has the supports in place to deal with all children up to age 18. Then the centres and councils' new guidelines would be really fitting for those over 18 and up to 25 to take their additional needs into account. Until the legislation changes are made, children will still appear in adult courts from age 12 in Scotland, and that is something that we need to change. Thank you very much indeed. If there are no more questions, I am just quite keen to move on and start to have a look at alternatives to custody and diversion from prosecution, and I'll maybe bring in Ms Mackay before we move on to community sentencing. Thank you, convener. I think that Professor Lesley-McHara and some of the other witnesses have talked about this, and I think that maybe given it in previous answers that why it should happen and the reasons possibly why it isn't happening, and I do agree with them, if I may, can I move on to the provision of secure care, which we've just been talking about as well? I'd like to explore the area of secure care generally as an alternative to incarceration in prisons or in young offenders institutions. I know that you probably heard powerful evidence from Bruce Adamson in the earlier round table saying that children should never be in prison, and I agree with that, and I suspect that others do too. Fiona Dyer and Ashley Cameron, I'll come to you. Your submissions stated that you have great concern about this, pointing out that those settings are not appropriate for children, and they certainly don't reflect the recommendations in the promise or the whole-system approach or gear effect. We know that children in those settings can often result in very tragic circumstances. If I could maybe come to Ashley first, your submission was quite powerful on this, and if you could maybe give your thoughts behind secure care, which can offer a holistic setting, and it can offer training for young people, et cetera, and trauma-informed care. If you can give your thoughts on that, and then maybe Fiona Dyer could come in, and then Fiona and Diane Dobby have both said that there are barriers to secure care, so I would just like to tease that out a wee bit, barriers through legislation. If I could come to Ashley first, please. I thank the opportunity to speak at the committee today. The reason why the promise informally and the independent care review have issues regarding secure care is quite rightly, as I said, that sometimes it has tragic consequences. It can lead to further criminalisation of young people, but there are also quite a few issues with the kind of secure care that we are talking about. We may define it in law as somewhere that is secure for young people to be into rehabilitation, but the experience of secure care is very different where their privileges are completely taken away from them, and a lot of young people can experience young people who have told the care review that it feels just like a prison. If that is what we are doing to our young people, then we are doing it very, very wrong. There are also further issues regarding secure care, such as cross-border placements, which have come up time and again at the Scottish Parliament. Young children have been moved from England to secure care places in Scotland, which then further reduces the amount of placements that they have available for kids in and from Scotland. The criminalisation and stigmatisation of young people in secure care is prevalent. It is not something that we should take great pride in in Scotland, even if it is in a secure care placement. A lot of care experience young people who were placed in secure care feel as if their voices had been totally shut down and they are told what to do and when to do it. There is no conversation around that. I have heard some very tragic experiences of young people who have been in secure care, and it has furthered the previous trauma that they went in their whist in the first place and led to complete mental health breakdown, complete breakdown in the relationships of family and their community. There is no chance of rehabilitation for some of these young people who are now adults and who are now deeper within the criminal justice system. It is a very complex issue, but I think that at the promise that we remain firm and that we should be locking up our children and young people. I probably want to put on the record that the secure care home in my constituency is excellent, and it has trauma-informed care. It offers qualifications to young people so that they can go on to positive destinations. I have had many visits with them and the experience that I have had and I am hearing that they have is very good. I think that you highlight the problem that there is no uniformity across Scotland with secure care homes. It is great that there are good ones as there should be for young people and they offer holistic care, but maybe that is not commonplace and uniformity. You mentioned the cross-border issue, and I am very aware of that. It is due to the funding mechanism for secure care homes, which, in my opinion, seems to be inappropriate and inadequate. Again, there is no uniformity. Some secure care homes will all have to bid for money, some end up getting more money than others. It just does not seem to work, so we need to look at that as a whole. The secure care home that I have visited and I am aware of is excellent as an alternative. I agree with you that it is the last resort ever to deprive children of their freedom, but as an alternative to prison and young offenders' institutes, I think that they have a place. Just to respond to that as well, I am not saying that every secure care placement in Scotland is absolutely tragic. Those are certainly the experiences that I have heard throughout my time campaigning in the care sector, and there are good placements there. Currently, it is one of the only alternatives to a custodial sentence. I think that maybe what I did not make quite clear was the amount of mental health support that is needed to help those children and young people to understand, accept and move on from their trauma is sorely needed. The funding that we currently have for mental health provision, especially for young people, sadly is not enough. If we are going to prevent further criminalisation of the care experience community, we need to get in the early doors to ensure that they can understand our journey and move on from their trauma. I agree with that. Fiona, would you like to come in, please? Yes, I totally agree. We do not want to lock any children up, but unfortunately some children to protect themselves and others need that form of security. In Scotland, our security state is a better place than the young offenders' institution, and there is, as you say, some really good work happening. I think that there has been a lot of work recently in the secure care pathway and standards that were co-produced with young people with secure care experience. We are introduced earlier this year to try and bring some consistency and improvements around secure care in the journey into and whilst there and the journey out of secure care to really improve that for the children and young people. As Ash said, that was listening to children who have been in secure care and learning from them. As we have heard, children have a complex need to have experienced a lot of trauma in their lives. They need the support and the secure care need resources, but secure care is a form of care, not a form of punishment. It is care staff, social workers and mental health staff who are working in small units within the larger secure environment to really try their best for these children who have just had real trauma in adversity in their life. That is not going to be something that is a quick fix for these children, but it is definitely a better environment for them than being in a young offenders' institution. Thank you, Fiona. Can I just ask you to comment briefly on the legislative barrier that you mentioned? If you are in court to be remand or to have a sentence in secure care, you need to be classed as a child, and therefore you need to be under the age of 16 or 16 and 17-year-old on a compulsory supervision through the children's hearing system. Otherwise, the sheriffs are unable to make that placement. They are unable to remand or sentence those young people, even if their needs have been assessed as being better met within secure care. A sheriff or judge has no option but to use a YY. That is really helpful. I am going to come back to covering a little bit about custody and secure care. I am going to bring in Collette Stevenson. I think that you are quite keen to ask a little bit about alternatives to custody. There are two elements to it. What stood out for me, even in the previous session, was custodial sentences or alternatives in the need to protect our communities. Having spoken to somebody who has gone through the open prison element of it, they had access to engaging with Prince's Trust, going out to work, playing football. Is that something that you think that we should have more of? We also talked about the structured sentences. How effective is that and where does social work play a bigger part in that? One of the things that stood out for me having worked in outdoor education is the empirical research around outdoor ed, particularly for youth offending and people who are maybe just going into the criminal justice at a risk. I am throwing quite a lot at you as well. The other thing that stood out for me, which worked really well and I do not know if any of you can come back on that, is campus cops. One of the biggest schools in South Lanarkshire came in and they were able to gauge if there was an element of offending or something coming through and how effective that would be going forward. I know that I have thrown a lot at you as well, but I am keen to hear your thoughts and what evidence is there on that. Do you have a particular witness in mind that you would like to direct that to? Mr Rennie, do you want to pick that up? One of the things that we have regularly encountered is the fact that young people caught up in the system have never had any positive role models in their lives. The provision of experiences outwith the justice setting in the countryside and sporting events, particularly with campus cops, are not only getting the experience but getting a positive influence in their life. That is a whole role of campus cops, in my opinion, to support the teachers and to be on the school when problems arise but to form positive relationships with the young people. I do not think that we can get enough of that. Young people that we have taken recently up to some outdoor activity have never been outwith the estate in which they live in their lives. There is a need to give people alternatives. I want to say before I pass on to the people that the whole thing here is focused on activity. After the fact, we need to be focused on prevention. We need to stop people coming into the system. That should be our sole focus. I could not agree more with what Professor Lysley said earlier on about poverty. We tackle each of those issues that we face just now in isolation. We tackle poverty and we need to make a great step forward. I will bring in Superintendent Convray on the back of Mr Rennie's response if he would like to pick up. I want to remind the campus officers that our experience of deployment is invaluable for all the benefits that Niven has laid out. They give the positive role models and the alternative route to policing and the support that we can give. One of the big benefits that we see from it is about identifying that underlying factor that is leading to a young person becoming identified. There has been a pattern of behaviour. For me, the campus officers are uniquely skilled and placed where they can support teaching staff and all our colleagues across the sectors to help to identify what they are and then step in at the early stage to try to get the right intervention before we even get to a family in the first place. Gemma Fraser, if you would like to make a couple of comments on that briefly if you would. I completely agree with what Niven highlighted about prevention at the early stage. From the point of view of the question that was asked, it is important to remember that prevention is about preventing the first offence but also the 41st offence. We need to think about how we use the criminal justice system and its set of places, whether that is diversionary, community payback or their custody, as an opportunity to continue that support to help young people to achieve their potential. As was highlighted in the sentencing council, experience our greatest capacity for change. It is about how we use all those elements to think about what we can do better and do differently against what young people need and want to achieve, which is no different to young people outside of that system. That means that we ensure that wherever possible, we do not use justice services in the delivery of that support, but that we connect young people to universal services in their communities through existing community planning networks and landscapes that ensure that young people have a trajectory that does not authorise them or continue authorisation in justice, but places them firmly in a community that welcomes them back and integrates them and supports rehabilitation on a different level. That is obviously a topical discussion. I know that Diane Dobie would quite like to come in and I will finish off this particular discussion with Professor McHara. Diane Dobie, do you want to come in? Yes, thank you. I will try to be a bit more concise on my response this time. Yes, I wanted to comment a bit on the structure of deferred sentencing and elaborate on that. The Lanarkshire was a pilot that was undertaken and evaluated by the University of West of Scotland and also by Community Justice Scotland. It was introduced as a partnership approach to try and reduce further the criminalisation of young people who were under the age of 21. It was applied to young people who had complex needs and it was a partnership approach between the court and action for children, action for industry, some of our colleagues in housing services as well. Basically, it involved doing a sort of expedited assessment, getting the young person's support fully following their journey from leaving court. For example, ensuring the links to poverty and connecting young people with a bus pass, ensuring that they were registered with a GP, ensuring that they managed to get some stable housing at other times that involved supporting them with their relationships with family. When they had to appear in court supporting them to do that, at the end of that, the majority of young people who were over 80 per cent ended up being admonished at the end of their order. As much as that is great, ultimately we do not want them in the justice system at all, but there are rare positive outcomes in terms of the structure of deferred sentencing. I think that the bit that worked there was a bit about the relationship and the time to do that relationship. It was pretty intensive. It required a lot of resource. However, it was a particularly good return on investment for young people in terms of one of the other measures linked to the question that was in relation to other supports that a lot of them were involved in. They had moved along the employability pipeline, so they were more ready for work. Some of them ended up in college, police, etc. Overall, it was really positive in that one study. I just wanted to reflect that that was a really positive motive to custody, which was tailored to meet the needs of young people. Thank you very much for that. I am just conscious of time, so I will come back to focus briefly on secure care. I know that Pauline McNeill, you had a question on that, if you would like to pick up. I will then move on to community centre sing and bring Jamie Greene in. I will make it quick. To be honest, I am not sure who will be the best place to answer it, so you can help me. I have heard a lot of really important stuff from Ashley Greene, for example, about secure care itself. She probably needs reviews and all that. I really just want to highlight the case. I am sure that there are others, of William Lindsay Brown. I know that we are going to discuss the rest in custody, but my question is that everyone was quite clear in that case. This is a 16-year-old who used to be should be referred to secure care and not a prison, but it was not available. That is my understanding. Has anything happened since that case? I know that there are other cases to deal with what seems to be a lack of secure care, and we are also, I believe, only mandated to a maximum of 70 or 80 per cent leaving the remainder for English placements. I do not understand if anyone could help me to understand why we have done this. Has anyone got any answers as to whether or not we have acted since that case? To me, it is a death that could have possibly been avoided. I wonder if, Ms Dyer, you would be able to come in on that perhaps? That was really tragic in relation to William, and I do believe that it was through a lack of beds. I think that it was your colleague who referred to it earlier, in relation to funding in secure care, because they are a charity and they need to generate their own income in relation to the number of young people that they have there. I do believe that there are emergency beds in all the units as well, but there are currently 50 per cent of our secure care beds. I have young people who are out from out with Scotland. As of yesterday, I believe, that was the figure. That is just due to the funding. I suppose that, in one advantage, it is because we do not need a lot of beds in Scotland, and we are managing a lot of young people in the communities and in different ways. That was just tragic and it should not happen, but until we look at the funding model and look at always having beds available and that, unfortunately, there has been discussions, but that is still progressing as speaking out, and I am sure that it will take time. That does not mean that what happened to William will not happen again. Just while we are on, Ms McNeill, you touched on the issue of deaths and custody. I will ask a follow-up question to Hannah Graham about whether you have any concerns about deaths in custody and perhaps deaths following custody. For example, delays in FAIs, or lack of findings of concern or support following release. Is there anything that you would like to pick up on around that? My written evidence submission and those of my colleagues at the University of Glasgow for the earlier round table on prisons both cover deaths on community sentences in my case and deaths in custody following release in the case of my University of Glasgow colleagues. The very reason that we have highlighted that analysis and, in some cases, perhaps figures newly in the public domain that have not been highlighted in that way before is because we are very concerned. We can speak for years, we can have commissions for years, we can have reviews for years about the problems of imprisonment or the use of custody, and in those years we can speak about wanting alternatives to custody and community sentences. Our analysis in the written evidence submission shows some quite serious considerations. In the community sentences, on one type, over a seven-year period you have 1,178 people who died, community payback orders that were listed as finished because of a death, and we have the submission from my colleagues about quite substantive concerns around deaths in custody. Both of those submissions, what they have in common, is that we are concerned particularly about suicide and we are concerned about drug-related deaths, as well as all other deaths. In raising such a sensitive topic, it is done with the compassion and the dignity that it deserves, but also the passion and the fire that it deserves. We need to pay attention. The chief inspector of prisons has recommended in her written evidence that there needs to be a review into deaths in custody and the following post-release, so that could include parole and non-parole licences and other types of licences. The figures that I have presented are around—they could be summarised probably in four or five words. For the people that are dying on community payback orders, they are young, they are mostly unemployed, they are criminalised and they are dead. If that does not spark an interest that criminologists, human rights advocates, healthcare workers and social workers have been trying to draw attention to what happens when earlier needs are not matched like mental healthcare, substance use, physical healthcare and when earlier inequalities and disparities are not addressed, we have, unfortunately, some substantive concerns around what happens. That includes the deaths of young people in custody, as well as the deaths of young people on community payback orders. In 2019-2020, among the deaths for that year on community payback orders, 61.3% were aged between 16 and 40 years old, so what we know is that this is not an age that we would typically expect to be dying. There are bereaved families. The media will pay attention to the deaths in custody and that is wholly understandable given the gravity of what's happened and the duty of the state. They have access potentially to fatal accident inquiries afterwards, if the Lord Advocate and COPFS decide. People on community sentences who are dying, we have far less data, we have under-reporting of it as a serious incident to the care inspectorate and we have quite worrying concerns, not only for community payback orders, but eight or nine types of orders or licences in the community. This is an area that has not had as much attention given to it or as much understanding given to it as it could be, but the resources and the relationships needed much earlier in the system and in the process so that we can learn because it's very hard to be held accountable if you do not count the deaths on community sentences. The Scottish Prison Service has a statutory duty to report data on their website on the deaths in prison custody and that's what my colleagues at the University of Glasgow have provided an analysis of and they will have more releases to come on that in the weeks to come. It's under-reporting as a big issue and we have the care inspectorate saying that of the deaths they've been notified of, which is a fraction of the actual deaths on community orders and licences, which is concerning because of the criteria that the majority they think are drug deaths or suicide-related. Ms Graham, thank you for that. I very much appreciate your passion and your insight. I'm just going to move things on just because of pressure of time, but thank you. Can I bring in Jamie Greene now and we'll maybe move on to looking at community sentencing? Can I put on the record my thanks to the academics who have put in some great work on the death in custody issue, which has been so rightly highlighted in today's media and it raises important issues. Dr Graham has done excellent work on this on an area that was previously perhaps unreported and the University of Glasgow on FAIs. It is worrying, I think, that nine in ten of FAIs that were analysed by those academics were found to have produced no recommendations at all on things that can change and one well-quoted mother of a young girl who sadly died in a young offenders institution said that the FEI system is broken and that's something we've heard time and time again in this country, but that's maybe an observation rather than a question in the interests of time. I thought maybe instead of talking about community sentencing, which we could spend all day on, if I could ask it a different question and that's about prevention and the reason I ask that is that I think there's perhaps a perception that Scotland doesn't suffer from the same levels of young gang violence that perhaps other cities do in other parts of either the UK or the world, but we do know that serious organised crime is an issue because we know that through the numbers of inmates who are involved in serious organised crime. Can I ask about work that is being done or not being done to ensure that young people are not being sucked in to serious organised crime at a young age so that we can prevent them falling into that trap of ending up in prison as high tariff, high profile offenders? To whom? To anyone that's interested. Perhaps crime prevention is the main thrust of this. Mr Rennie, can I suggest Mr Rennie, would you like to come in on that? Yes, thank you very much. By dint of my post as director of Scottish Van's Reduction Unit, I'm actually chairing a body right across the UK involving the 17 Van's Reduction Units and a number of other organisations called the Hope Collective. It has that very aim that Mr Greene has asked of it because to me the one issue that you need to provide to stop people getting involved in serious organised crime or criminality is to give them hope and aspiration and opportunity. People need to have alternatives and that doesn't matter whether you're in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow or Aberdeen. It goes back to some of the other issues that we touched on throughout this session this morning. People like me brought up in poverty that have a lack of opportunity. Harry Burns, a former chief medical officer, calls it a sense of hopelessness. If we lead people with that lack of choices, then somebody else will fill it. The people who tend to fill it are people operating a quick buck or an opportunity to wear Gucci trainers or to drive in a fast car and that tends to be serious and organised crime. The answer to our problems keep coming back to this one issue, tackling the inequality in our towns and cities. That's a brief answer. Finally, we also know from looking at the current backlog of court cases that around 80 per cent or perhaps more of those are related to sexual crimes or indeed crimes of violence against women and children. I suspect that the average age of those accused is higher than perhaps other types of crime. However, we do know that those types of crimes can often extend from adverse behaviour and experiences at younger ages. What has been done similar to addressing the prevention of violent crime to prevent people who will go on to commit sexual crime? Perhaps Mr Rennie might want to fall on on that. There's a lot of work on going. We have projects on going just now to working with young people looking at harmful sexual behaviour in schools. Young people, there's a mentors and violence prevention programme now delivered by Education Scotland. Does that sort of work as well? That's not to say that there isn't an awful lot more that could be done and perhaps the academics might be better placed to answer that. I wonder if I'll just bring in Superintendent Convry, if you would like to say a few words on that. Thank you, convener. It was more in response to Mr Rennie's first question about how we're supporting young people who are exposed or become involved in serious organised crime. Of course, it's a sort of strategy that we've got in consultation with Government and national effort. I'm very much focusing on the divert aspect and trying to divert young people away from that opportunity. We also recognise that there will always be individuals who end up caught up in it and may end up incarcerated. There's a big effort that we've put in just now with our colleagues at SPS, a police officer deployed in the moment, to work with the young men, to understand and try and create positive opportunities and positive lifestyle choices for them, and that obviously feeds into the work that Niven and his team do at the violence adoption unit. I think that it's about diversion, but it's also about fundamental understanding what the problem is. I think that it comes back to provision of service to all of us to support those young people and give them that hope and aspiration that they can achieve. Thank you very much indeed. Fiona Dyer, would you like to come in on this just before we move on? Yes, I think just to say as well, especially since Covid, but there is an issue with child criminal exploitation, as well as child sexual exploitation, and these are children who are victims and they are being victimised mainly by adults and by getting brought into criminalised behaviour, or getting brought into sexualised behaviour in a lot, is online. There's a lot more since during the pandemic online, but now we're more back face to face. There's evidence that it's back on the ground again. I think that that's just something to bear in mind that these children are actually victims first and that they need to be treated as victims. There's work going on to release that, but probably not enough in Scotland that we're really recognising that these children are victims first instead of criminalising them. There are some young people currently in Pullman from a Vietnamese background who, we believe, have been trafficked, and they are victims as well, but we are locking them up for their own protection as well as because they have been criminalised themselves. I think that's something in Scotland that we need to get better. Thank you very much. I'm just conscious of the time. If there are no more questions from members, I intend to pull this session to a close. If any of the witnesses, if you feel that there is anything outstanding that you would like to share with the committee, please feel free to do so in writing, and the committee will take that evidence into account. My grateful thanks to all our witnesses today. I'm sure that we could have continued the discussion for a lot longer, but thank you again for your participation today. I'll just bring this part of the meeting to a close and have a short break before we move into a private session.