News

HMIPS Liaison Visit to HMP Kilmarnock

Thursday, April 15, 2021 - 10:38

On 12 August 2020, HMIPS published an inspection report on a Liaison Visit to HMP Kilmarnock. Much of it advised of activities to be re-commenced i.e. at planning, not implementation stage. Again, it advised “Whilst acknowledging that HMP Kilmarnock were providing more time out of cell than we had seen on previous liaison visits, along with allowing prisoners access to a phone while isolated under rule 41 (COVID-19), there is still a tension between the rights set out under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the restrictions having to be imposed”. We are concerned that prisoners' human rights are being breached and that this needs to be addressed directly. We are therefore raising this with HMIPS and partners in the criminal justice system.

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Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act - Electronic Monitoring

Thursday, April 15, 2021 - 10:32

On 11 August 2020, a Ministerial Statement from the Cabinet Secretary advised of plans to introduce regulations to enable electronic monitoring of bail through the Management of Offenders  (Scotland) Act 2019. We would have liked to have seen this included in the primary legislation to help reduce the number of people being held on remand, however, welcome acknowledgement of the need for secondary legislation to allow for this.

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Outstanding Unpaid Work (Community Payback Orders)

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 17:41

On 15 July 2020, Social Work Scotland published an important paper drawing attention to the 700K outstanding hours of unpaid work under community payback orders and imploring the Scottish Government to use secondary legislation to reduce this by 450K hours in order to avoid serious ramifications across the whole criminal justice system. We welcomed this timely intervention, with its insightful comment and detailed modelling.

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HMP Dumfries Full Inspection

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 17:34

On 30 July 2020, a full pre-COVID inspection report on HMP Dumfries was published advising that there were no offence-focused programmes available on-site with long waiting lists for progression assessments and programmes. Given that there is currently no movement between sites this has serious implications for prisoners’ release and is something we will be following up.

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New European Prison Rules

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - 17:30

On 14 July 2020 revised European Prison Rules were published, which reiterated that regime restriction cannot be justified by lack of resources/staff absence rates; and for the first time, specified the non-disciplinary circumstances under which prisoners can be separated from others, stating that “for any reason, prisoners who are separated shall be offered at least two hours of meaningful human contact a day”. We highlighted that these human rights issues were something which needed to be borne in mind in any future prison inspections.

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