Who tells the victim?

The row over early release is always about whether we are tough or soft on crime. A complex policy area reduced to tabloid slogans. I spent years in the middle of it at Holyrood, and I think that is completely the wrong argument. Our prisons are not soft. They are full. And the people who get forgotten are the ones who deserve it least.

This week prison reform hit the headlines in England, where Andy Burnham's government paused a plan, legislated under Keir Starmer, to release prisoners after just a third of their sentence. But Scotland got there first, and far more quietly. In May, John Swinney's government moved short-sentence release from 40% to 30%, after a winter in which the Scottish Prison Service had already let people out early in emergency tranches, with the population at a record high of more than 8,400. Way more than there is capacity for in our antiquated jails. This is not new news; it has been a long time coming, and seems to be a perennial issue of the demand and supply of cell space.

Cue the familiar noise about going soft on crime. Predictable, yet perhaps warranted. But here is what the noise misses. Every party that has actually held the keys has done exactly this. Rishi Sunak's Conservatives ran early release before the last election. Starmer's Labour released tens of thousands after it. The SNP has done it in Scotland. You do not get a cross-party habit like that from ideology. You get it from arithmetic. When the estate is full, someone leaves by the back door. The argument then becomes who should and should not be released early, aside from the deeper philosophical and moral debate about the value and length of the sentences handed down in the first place.

So the release percentage, the thing the whole argument fixates on, is close to the least important number in the story. A question worth asking is why our prisons filled in the first place, and, more importantly, how sensible voices can alter the course of the law, if they know how to, and when to.

Why they are really full

Start with the buildings. Much of the estate is simply old. Barlinnie, still holding well over a thousand of Scotland's prisoners, opened in 1882, and it was built to contain people, not to change them. Overcrowd a prison like that and the first thing to disappear is the very work that stops people coming back: the addiction treatment, the mental health support, the education, the programmes that address behaviour. A full prison quietly cannibalises its own ability to rehabilitate. It is the same story the length of the UK, in an English estate now holding more than 87,000 people in space built for around 70,000.

Then the nature of the crime coming through. As the courts grind through record backlogs, the people arriving are more serious, not less: historic sexual offences, organised crime, serious drugs, weapons and violence. Those carry long sentences, and the population gets heavier even as the headlines fixate on specific cases. The problem is far bigger then one injustice, it is systemic.

Then remand. Rarely discussed yet such an influencing factor. In Scotland alone, roughly a quarter of the entire prison population has not been convicted of anything, held awaiting trial, presumed innocent, sometimes for many months or indeed years. People can end up spending longer inside waiting for a trial than they would have served had they pled guilty on day one. Make that make sense.

And finally, the "alternatives" that society refuses to trust. I have deep natural suspicion as to the efficacy and proportionality of some of them, but I am neither averse to finding new ways to balance punishment relevant to the crime committed. We have community sentences, electronic tagging and newer tools like sobriety monitoring that can do real work, and keep people in jobs and families rather than cells. But public confidence in them is thin, not helped by years of the political press office "bird boxes and bee houses" caricature, and they only work if breaches are actually enforced. Too often they are not, and a bail condition nobody polices is simply another broken promise to a victim.

The two things the argument forgets

Notice what all the shouting about percentages skips over.

The first is the victim. For years Scotland's own Victim Notification Scheme was found to be inept. People who had survived the worst days of their lives could learn that the person who did it to them was walking free, not from a letter or a phone call, but by accident, from a neighbour, or by seeing them in the street. It was the same failure south of the border, where England's victims' commissioner had to warn that some victims were never told at all. A release date on a form means nothing if the person it endangers is the last to know.

The second is whether the time inside has actually changed anyone. Release someone earlier without touching the addiction, the untreated mental illness, the cognitive issues or the very environmental context that put them there, and you have not shortened a sentence, you have simply moved the next offence forward, and booked in a future victim. The revolving door analogy is, sadly, very real, judging by reoffending rates. That benefits no-one.

What I fought for, and who I fought it with

This is the part of the story that explains why it matters to me. Unashamedly, it is the part I am proudest of, and it speaks to both of those failures.

During the passage of Scotland's most recent justice reforms I pushed hard, from the opposition benches, to put the victim back at the centre of the moment that frightens them most: release. The substance of what I argued for largely made it into law. A right to be told, properly and in good time, before an offender is released and not after. A stronger voice in the decisions and the conditions that affect their own safety. And support and information that follows a victim before, during and after release, rather than switching off the day the trial ends. Rights strengthened, and a voice amplified, at exactly the point the system had been leaving people on their own.

I did not win any of that alone, and I would never pretend to. It was won because of the tireless, and frankly humbling, bravery of people I met who had suffered and lost at the hands of abuse, violence and trauma, and who chose to relive it in committee rooms and quiet meetings so that the next person might be spared a little of it. Working alongside them, and with Victim Support Scotland, patiently and without press releases, we got it done. Plenty of opposition members table amendments. Very few see the substance become law. Those did, and most are now there in black and white in the statute book. Of course practice and theory are oft two different things and we are yet to see if justice partners have caught up these changes.

The grown-up answer to early release is...

The debate itself runs on a dispiriting spectrum, from the reflexive hug of the soft left at one end to the hang-them theatre of the vigilante Facebook pages at the other. Neither has ever built a working system, and neither is the answer.

The honest answer is unfashionably dull, and it has to be done in sequence and over years. Modernise the estate so it can actually rehabilitate. Clear the remand backlog so we stop jailing the presumed innocent by accident of scheduling. Fund the community alternatives and then enforce them, so courts and the public come to trust them. Take rehabilitation and restorative justice seriously, because they are the only things that reliably reduce the next crime. And do the hardest thing of all, which is to stop people offending in the first place. Keep the victim at the centre of every one of those decisions, not the afterthought at the end.

None of that fits on a leaflet. All of it works better than what we are doing now.

How change actually happens

I am not entirely cynical about any of this, and my own experience is the reason.

Reform of a system this emotive is not made in the shouting. It is made in the quiet months before any politician is asked to cast a vote, when a serious organisation turns up with the evidence, the lived experience and a clear ask, and puts it in front of the people writing the law at the one moment it can still be changed. That is exactly how those victims' changes became law.

So if you run a victim support charity, a community justice partnership, an addiction or mental health service, any organisation that spends its days clearing up after all of this, you already know the national debate is aimed at the wrong target. Namely, voters, not victims.

The prisons will stay full for years. The politics will stay loud. But underneath the noise, the simplest test of whether we are getting any of this right is also the one we forget first. Somebody has to remember to tell the victim.

Jamie Greene is a former shadow justice secretary who served on the Scottish Parliament's Justice Committee, where he worked with survivors and victims' organisations to strengthen victims' rights and notification around release in Scots law. He founded Kempock, which helps organisations get their evidence in front of the people who make these decisions, when the stakes are high and the end result affects real people.