Listen: Chris Daw QC calls for enlightened view on criminal rehabilitation

Chris Daw QC

Mr Daw shared his views with host Byron Vincent in new podcast Justice, Disrupted, produced in association with Community Justice Scotland. “I would close almost every prison,” he told the podcast, as he believes prisons are damaging society as well as individuals.

He said: “The key to it is to divert as many people as possible, particularly young people, away from the criminal justice system in the first place.”

He told Mr Vincent: “(Prison) does work if the only thing that you’re trying to get out of it is to make people who are desperately damaged, often addicted and have suffered enormous trauma in their lives even worse. But if there’s any other plan, like reducing crime, or making the world a safer place then it definitely doesn’t work.”

Mr Daw believes custody should only be used for a very small number of people who present a direct risk to others on a daily basis.

“Many of the prisoners in our prison system were in care, so they didn’t really have a home life or a family environment in any normal. The prison system is just a continuation of the sort of trauma and abuse that they had as children.”

He said many of the people in the justice system are vulnerable and lead chaotic lives. After serving their sentence in prison they are released with no home, job or money.

“Unsurprisingly the end result of that is just that they go back and do whatever it was they were doing that got them in there in the first place.”

He also questions why people want punishment for crimes.

“Why do you want this punishment? If the punishment means locking up young men, mostly, for the rest of their lives, for not even violent crimes, but repeat drug offences and so on, as they do in the US in massive numbers. Are you satisfied then, you know, if our prison population wasn’t 80,000, but 800,000, would that be enough? When’s it enough? At what point do you sit back and say, ‘Cor we’re spending billions and billions on this system that fundamentally does more damage to our society than it prevents?’

“So just divert people away from the criminal justice system as much as possible, and deal with those fundamental issues of somewhere to live, money to live on, and maintaining and retaining their social contact and their family contacts. If you address those three things, the great majority of those in our system would not continue in the system and they would come through the other side, they would get jobs and they would just live a law abiding and happy life.”

Finally, Mr Daw believes there should be more openness around the court process.

“The more information that people have about reality of the criminal justice system, I suspect, the more that we’ll finally see some sort of public understanding of where the flaws in the system are.

“The assumption is that those in the criminal justice process as defendants are bad people that we need to get rid of and get off the streets. If people listened to case after case after case, as I’ve done over the years, they’d realise that the true picture is incredibly diverse in terms of why people are in the criminal justice system, and that the explanations are really nuanced.”