Opposition Stymies Bid To Expand Prisoner Tagging

The battle over extending home tagging as a way of cutting Scotland’s record prison population is to go to a full vote at Holyrood, after the government accused Labour of “playing games” yesterday by forming an alliance with the Tories to block it.

The Tories always opposed the system of Home Detention Curfews (HDCs) when the last administration introduced it for prisoners in the final four-and-a-half months before release.

Yesterday Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, appear-ed before MSPs in committee to seek approval for a statutory instrument which would extend the system, allowing it to be used for longer-term inmates who had served more than four years and extending the period by six weeks to six months.

But Labour member Bill Butler led opposition to the move unless there was a built-in “sunset clause” meaning the new provision would end next year when the first of three new prisons comes on stream.

Mr MacAskill instead offered a promise of a review at that time of the whole system of HDCs, saying this pledge went further than a simple sunset clause, an amendment which would take “several months” to reintroduce at a time when the prison population had reached record levels.

“I’m appalled,” Mr MacAskill said after the committee split 4-4 and rejected his proposals on the casting vote of Tory Justice convener Bill Aitken. “I think Labour and the Tories are playing politics with our prisons. We have significant problems there because of overcrowding. This is a situation that we as a government inherited. We as a government are taking action, but we have a short-term problem.”

The figures from last week showed that the country’s prisons housed a total of 8026 inmates, but Mr MacAskill said yesterday that this had gone up to 8045. Mr Butler argued for a sunset clause to allow Parliament to reconsider the impact and the effect on public safety.