Scotland’s overcrowded prisons are not simply a justice problem. They expose a deeper failure to connect prevention, poverty and public spending. We know much of what needs to change. So why does government keep paying for the consequences instead? Why does prevention keeps losing out to the cost of failure?
Recent BBC Scotland coverage majored on the fact that Scotland’s prisons are full. That is true. But it is also a slightly convenient way of framing the problem.
On September 1, Scotland’s prisons held 8,587 people. Of these, 2,207 were on remand – more than one in four. The population had already reached a record 8,603 in May.
At some point, “pressure on the system” becomes a euphemism for “the system isn’t working”.
Remand is supposed to be the exception. More than 2,200 people suggests we have developed a rather broad understanding of what “exception” means.
Of course, some people need to be in custody. Public protection matters. But it is hard to believe that Scotland has exhausted the alternatives before arriving at a prison cell.
Supported accommodation, bail supervision, electronic monitoring, intensive mentoring and proper throughcare are not radical ideas. They are basic infrastructure for a justice system that claims to believe in prevention.
Yet government has an extraordinary ability to make straightforward ideas complicated. Which budget does it sit in? Who owns it? Is it justice, housing or health? Has it been piloted? Does it fit the existing programme?
Almost certainly, we need a working group.
Meanwhile, the person remains in prison.
This matters because Scotland’s prison crisis is not simply a problem of capacity. It is a problem of how the state organises itself around people whose lives do not fit neatly into policy silos.
The rehabilitation argument exposes the same weakness.
We routinely describe prison as a place of rehabilitation. Yet the independent Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission recently reported that, while the Scottish Prison Service Corporate Plan refers to rehabilitation, it contains no detail about how rehabilitation is delivered and no broader strategy for rehabilitative work.
That is not a minor drafting issue.
If rehabilitation is genuinely central to the purpose of imprisonment, it should be possible to identify the resource dedicated to it, the time protected for it and the outcomes expected from it.
Otherwise rehabilitation risks becoming a comforting word attached to incarceration.
Containment may be necessary. But containment is not rehabilitation.
At the Wise Group, we see what sustained support can achieve. Our New Routes throughcare service supported 1,351 people in 2024/25, with 72% sustaining engagement after release and a return-to-custody rate of 10.5%, compared with a national 28.6% baseline. These figures reinforce the case for investing in the relationships and practical support that help people rebuild their lives beyond the prison gate.
Then there is poverty.
Scottish Government research has acknowledged estimates that between 20,000 and 27,000 children experience the imprisonment of a parent, while also conceding that there is no reliable current figure.
That should trouble a government which has made eradicating child poverty a defining national mission.
What has struck me is how little poverty features in the justice related discussion. I find that extraordinary.
Imprisonment does not stop at the prison gate. It can remove income from a household, destabilise housing, disrupt children’s lives and push already vulnerable families deeper into poverty.
The consequences are then picked up elsewhere in government.
Same family. Different budget code.
That is the wider public service reform problem in miniature.
Families do not experience justice, housing, poverty and employment as separate systems. They experience one life. Government experiences portfolios.
The money tells its own story.
More than £1bn is being invested in Scotland’s prisons. Community Justice Services receive around £104m, with less than £9m going to third-sector funding.
These are not directly interchangeable pots. Prisons require substantial capital, staffing and security. But budgets are still a statement of where the state has chosen to build capacity.
Scotland has considerable capacity for dealing with failure once it reaches a prison gate.
It is less enthusiastic about building the social infrastructure that might stop some people reaching it.
That is not prevention. It is paying for failure at the most expensive end of the system.
Scotland is not short of strategies, consultations, pilots, frameworks and reviews. Nor is it short of evidence about the links between poverty, housing, trauma, addiction, economic inactivity and offending.
What it lacks is the ability – or perhaps the willingness – to organise money and accountability around the lives people actually lead.
This is why prevention so often stalls. One part of government pays while another part benefits. Justice may spend the money, housing may see the gain, health may invest and employability may benefit later. The incentive is to defend departmental lines rather than optimise the whole system.
We then describe the result as “complex”.
It is complex. But complexity can also become a very sophisticated excuse for not changing anything.
Scotland’s prison population should therefore be read as more than a justice statistic. It is a measure of how well the state joins up around people with multiple and overlapping needs.
More than 2,200 people on remand, record prison numbers, thousands of children affected by parental imprisonment and a rehabilitation system whose dedicated capacity is difficult to identify all point in the same direction.
The problem is not that Scotland does not understand what is going wrong.
The problem is that it keeps managing the consequences through separate systems, separate budgets and separate accountabilities.
We know enough.
The missing ingredient is not another consultation.
It is the courage to organise government around outcomes rather than organisational charts.
Until that changes, Scotland will continue to spend heavily – and then commission another review to understand why nothing changed.
A shorter version of this article appeared in The Times on 16 October 2026
Sean Duffy is Chief Executive of the Wise Group