Chamber and committees

Detective Chief Superintendent Higgins, do you want to add anything from a police perspective?

What I am driving at is that overcrowding is one of the central issues in managing all the pressures that you have mentioned to the committee. I accept that the provision of more prison places does not mean to say that the problem will be solved, but I hope that it will give more scope for less overcrowding and doubling up. Jim, can you answer that?

I am just trying to envisage whether anything that will alleviate the pressures that prisons are under and that will keep prisoners and staff safe is going to happen in the future. I would have thought that you would already be planning for some of those things. I think that Inverness is also doubling capacity. That is not everything, but it is something to cling on to. I thought that you might be planning for that.

Is the SPS planning for the possibility that, should the prison population remain broadly the same, you would have scope to do more because you will have more space?

Thank you. That is useful to know.

When we visited HMP Edinburgh, we had a discussion about the window grilles, which Liam Kerr talked about, and drones. I think that there was something about this in your submission—or there is something in the papers to back this up. It was suggested that, through the use of drones, weapons are going to come into prisons—or maybe that is already happening. Can you tell the committee anything about that?

Thank you. My last question is a bit more sensitive, but I feel that I have just got to ask it, and you may answer it however you wish. There has been some suggestion that drugs are brought into prison by prison staff, either for financial benefit or because of what you have been talking about—the level of organised crime in prisons, which is difficult to manage. Is that something that you have heard? Are you able to talk about that? If so, what steps would be taken to deal with it? It would be helpful to get an answer on that.

Good morning. We have heard about all the different ways in which you can try to prevent drugs from coming into prisons. Since the introduction of those measures, such as X-ray body scanners, have you seen a sizeable reduction in drugs coming into prisons?

In our inquiry, we had the opportunity last week to sit in private and listen to the experience of former prisoners. That evidence has changed my perspective a little and it has been very valuable.

Drugs are a huge issue for the management and the officers, and that has made the job more difficult, as well as being difficult for prisoners who do not want to bring in drugs. However, as Gillian Walker said, there is the issue of boredom. One thing that was said, which struck me, was that, for some, it is about escaping the reality of what they have done and about the fact that it can take a long time for them to come to terms with their crimes. I had never really considered all those things.

It strikes me that, at the moment, prisons almost seem to be centres for drug rehabilitation. One comment was that there should perhaps be some dedicated provision in the SPS for those who want to get off drugs. I ask about that in the full knowledge that this is not the time because there is severe overcrowding and we are still waiting on the new prisons being built. However, in an ideal world, has the SPS ever considered that there should be more dedicated units in the SPS for those who want to enter rehabilitation?

I want to ask about the future capacity of the SPS.

As I am sure is the case for the witnesses, I remain very concerned that, in Scotland, prisoners who serve their time for the crimes that they have committed cannot always serve it in a drug-free environment; I am especially concerned about how that affects those who were not on drugs when they went into prison. That is a national concern, which I am sure that the witnesses share.

In the previous evidence session, a question came up about the capacity of the new Barlinnie prison. I understand that the capacity of Barlinnie is 900, although prisoners double up at the moment. I think that the new prison will have 1,300 places or thereabouts, which is an increase of about 400 places.

Will the witnesses clarify that? What will the increased capacity be when the new Barlinnie comes online?

I want to ask about the plan for the new Barlinnie prison, which is much further away than everybody would like. The plan is that we will eventually have a prison that has a higher capacity than the current Barlinnie prison. That is my understanding, because I have asked the Government some questions about it.

For a start, you would like to think that that would help reduce overcrowding overall, although it might not. Is it too early to say whether it will give third sector organisations, which are the backbone of all this work, a chance to deal with the drug problem in prison in a better way, because there will be more space and the staff will be able to concentrate a bit more on how they can assist prisoners, rather than what they are doing right now, which is dealing with daily pressures that are caused by overcrowding? We want to ensure that no violence erupts because of the conditions that prisoners are being held in. Have you given any thought to how things might work in future?