How Scotland is failing Dostoevsky’s test of a good society
Scotland must care for its convicted criminals because what affects them will affect us all in the end
I was listening to the radio on the issue of overcrowded prisons. It covered being locked up 23 hours a day and the problems that many of those incarcerated have. A journalist asked, “Do you think anyone cares?”
The interviewee, as is often the case, ignored this and instead answered a completely different, and unasked, question. I heard the journalist pose the same question to a different interviewee and, in true political style, he again received a response that didn’t engage in the slightest with what he’d asked.
I was sorry to hear this as it’s a great question. If we don’t care about something, we’re unlikely to be interested in whether it’s good or not. If we don’t think we’ll be affected by a system, process or policy, then why would we care?
But it’s important that we’re able to see beyond our own doorstep. As Dostoevsky famously said, “a society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals”.
A different perspective
After the recent riots, I was interested in the public reaction to the reports of those who pled guilty. Although south of the Border, so a different legal system, one case caught my eye. A 12-year-old boy, who didn’t know what an asylum seeker was, had cycled in front of a bus, forcing it to stop and participated in looting.
No one could deny the child’s conduct needed addressed, but in Scotland we focus on the need and not deed. There was opprobrium online, tired talk of feral children – you can imagine the response. And then, a report appeared that stated his mother hadn’t attended the sentencing, instead going ahead with a planned holiday to Ibiza.
Suddenly the mood music changed. That information brought everything into sharp relief – not a hooligan after all, but a child worthy of sympathy. A parent who hadn’t accompanied their no doubt frightened child when he was brought before the court.
In the blink of an eye – or tweak of a headline – we cared. Perhaps we thought of our own children and considered what we would have done. Maybe we considered the sacrifices we would have made, even giving up our own liberty for that of our children.
Hard choices
It's harder to empathise with adults currently packed into our prisons, and easier not to – if you can’t do the time etc. They have complicated lives and are crammed into cells, only leaving them for an hour a day.
They are desperate, returning to prison for help with mental health and substance use issues. Maybe that’s not enough to shift your thinking – but it doesn’t change the decisions we need to make.
Last week prison numbers reached 8,228, too many for the system to deal with. So we need to have difficult conversations about release with victim organisations and consider the demands on housing and other stretched local authority services. There will be failures, criticism and headlines. But still, these hard choices remain.
These are challenging times for us all, so it can be hard to care about those deemed the worst or the lowest. But we must. They don’t exist in a vacuum and what affects them, affects us all in the end.
Karyn McCluskey is chief executive of Community Justice Scotland