Too many of Scotland’s women end up in jail – and that’s bad news for us all

Scotland sends too many women to jail. Two-thirds of female inmates are mothers. The status quo just doesn’t work for the women, their children or society.

I am as uncompromising as the majority of Scots when it comes to crime; I want to see serious criminals punished. But we need to think about the impact jailing women has on their families. For too many children across Scotland, the imprisonment of their mother leads to the trauma of sometimes unnecessary separation.

It’s a startling fact that today we send twice as many women in Scotland to jail as we did when the Scottish parliament was first established in 1999. Many jailed women have suffered from abuse and have mental-health problems. Many also have alcohol and drug problems.

When a father goes to prison in Scotland, 95% of children remain living with their mother. But when a mother is locked up, fewer than one in five stays with their father. The rest are sent to live with other family or are put into social care. Many have no contact with their mother at all. The imprisoned mother too often loses contact with her children and community. The system turns inmates into nomads.

One in three children with a parent in prison develops serious mental-health issues. Those children whose mothers are in prison are also more likely to follow in their footsteps and end up in prison themselves. It can be a vicious circle of crime and punishment.

Bluntly, locking up women is not the best way to reduce crime. The Scottish government’s own statistics show that women serving short prison sentences are much more likely to reoffend than those given a community sentence. Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only women’s prison, is the most violent prison in the country.

So how do we deal with women who commit crimes? Letting them go unpunished isn’t an option. That would send entirely the wrong signal.

But SNP government ministers in Edinburgh don’t have to look too far for a solution. All they need do is dust down the report by the former lord advocate Dame Elish Angiolini. Two years ago the commission on female offending recommended closing Cornton Vale, and replacing it with a smaller jail for long-term and high-risk prisoners. When the findings of the Angiolini commission were published, the then SNP justice minister heralded them as a “compelling vision for the future”.

Cornton Vale will soon close its doors, giving us a chance for a fresh start. It will be an opportunity to move from custody to community-based sentences for low-level female offenders.

Yet the SNP government wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past by creating a new central super-prison for women at HMP Inverclyde. By pushing forward with this, the Scottish government seems determined to plan for failure. Instead we should focus on community-based sentences that would help to break the cycle of reoffending.

Scottish Labour would do things differently. We would scrap the plan for this new female prison. We would use the money to invest in alternative community-based sentences for women. We would also build smaller family justice centres so that women who are imprisoned can be nearer their children, who can more easily visit.

I am delighted that our approach has found support across the political spectrum. That this policy has the support of the Women for Independence organisation, academics and the Howard League for Penal Reform is important. We can move beyond the divisions brought about by last year’s referendum, and come together to make our country a better, and safer, place to live. Imprisoning fewer mothers is part of that vision.