Former Lord Advocate calls for stronger community rehabilitation plans to create viable alternative to prison

A former Lord Advocate has warned that judges may not see community rehabilitation plans for criminals as a viable alternative to imprisonment.

Dame Elish Angiolini currently commissioner on women offenders, speaking to Holyrood’s Justice Committee, said that unless the Community Justice Bill is made stronger, jailing criminals could remain “a very tempting default position” for judges.

Dame Elish criticised the Scottish government’s treatment of community justice funding, which has resulted in charities having to reconstitute under different names in order to secure funding.

She said while charities chase money, taxpayers are having to pay a fortune to keep offenders in jail.

Christine Grahame, SNP MSP, said the issue was “depressing” and that the committee had raised it numerous times since the inception of the Scottish Parliament.

Dame Elish told MSPs on the committee that “Community justice wasn’t being measured in terms of its effectiveness, so you couldn’t convince judges that it was actually making a difference,”

She added: “There was no extensive research and very short-term provision of projects which would be there for 18 months and the personnel would disappear, or they would metamorphosise into another project in order to gain funding from the government.

“This short-termism meant the whole system was very bitty and it wasn’t cohesive.

“We recommended a structure with very strong leadership, which would be on a par with the police, prison and prosecution services in the justice system so that it had a stronger voice and was accountable for what it does in terms of its effectiveness.”

Dame Elish added: “This Bill goes some way toward achieving a stronger structure but I’m not convinced that it will be strong enough or cohesive enough to deliver what we would have hoped in our report.”

On the short-term approach to funding, Cleland Sneddon, who represented the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, said: “I couldn’t agree more with what Dame Elish said about the short-term nature of funding.

“Organisations, even when they alight upon a fantastic service model, half the time they have got an eye to what’s going to happen in 18 months’ time.

“It’s ridiculous situation that what works can’t be sustained because of the short-term cyclical approach to funding.”

Ms Grahame said: “It’s absolutely depressing, I’ve been hearing this for 16 years in here.

“Different revenue funding sources don’t match up, organisations often have three which all end at different times and they spend half their time bidding, trying to get money, and then changing slightly their purpose and their name so that they can keep going.

“I hope that someone is listening, because some of us have been here for a long time and this has not been resolved.”