The Paradox of Scottish Life Imprisonment

Abstract

More people are serving life sentences in Scotland as a proportion of the national population than in any other country in Europe. Yet , in many respects, Scotland claims to adopt a welfarist rather than a penal approach to criminal justice. This paper uses a wide range of data to explain the factors underpinning this paradox. It focuses on key aspects of the imposition and implementation of life sentences, providing, for the first time, an analysis that goes behind headline figures. The paper concludes that, notwithstanding the commitment to welfare in penal policy, the high rate of life imprisonment is driven by both increased punitiveness and attempts to reduce the risk that serious crime poses to society. Finally, the paper outlines strategies for reducing the use of life imprisonment, which may be more effective because they pay close attention to the Scottish penal context, but which have relevance for other jurisdictions seeking to reverse penal excess.

Life imprisonment: a relic of the past or dira recessitas

“…It should be noted that life imprisonment is stipulated by most European states. For example, Smit and Morrison, exploring the paradoxes of Scottish life imprisonment, point out that more people serve life sentences in Scotland than in any other country in Europe [14].…”

Progressive penality as performance

“…Unlike the churn of short-sentenced prisoners tar-geted by PASS and (ostensibly) by the community justice reforms, life-sentenced prisoners enter prison in relatively small numbers but remain there for a long time; once released they can be recalled to prison at any time for any breach of their parole conditions, and may remain imprisoned indeterminately. As Van zyl Smit & Morrison (2020) argue, the number of life-sentenced prisoners challenges the conception of Scotland as 'welfarist' in penal matters; reducing the number of life-sentenced people in prison could bring about a much more sustainable reduction in prison numbers.…”

Becoming a Prison Officer: An Analysis of the Early Development of Prison Officer Cultures

“…The Scottish context has both shared and divergent features of other comparable jurisdictions such as Ireland, New Zealand, and some Scandinavian countries (Brangan 2020; Hamilton 2011, 2016; Lacey 2012; Spencer 2015), yet it is beset with contradiction: it is a small nation with welfarist penal practices embedded into key parts of its justice system (McAra 2005; McVie 2017), and, when compared with England and Wales, as it usually is, it is often regarded as comparatively progressive (Brangan 2020). However, within this context, persistent and undeniable punitiveness remains, most notably in its extraordinary (by Western European standards) use of both imprisonment (Armstrong 2018b; Brangan 2019, 2020; van Zyl Smit and Morrison 2020) and community penalties (McNeill 2018). Although human rights approaches have been adopted within the context of Scottish imprisonment, this merely allowed for an expansion of the penal apparatus (Armstrong 2018a).…”

“…However, none of this literature is based in Scotland. This matters because of the distinctive organisational context in which prisons were to be remoulded into a ‘citizen recovery service’ and prison officers into ‘justice professionals’ (Scottish Prison Service 2016), and Scotland's distinctive wider national context of both laudatory welfarist based practices (McAra 2005, 2008; McVie 2017), and excessive punitiveness (Armstrong 2018b; Brangan 2019, 2020; van Zyl Smit and Morrison 2020). Much of the literature cited above is based in England and Wales, yet it is assumed to be applicable to the whole of the United Kingdom or perhaps Western Europe.…”