One of my biggest achievements in my life was building a motorbike from scratch. Oh, how proud I was and the result was impressive, even if I say so myself.

I called her Sophie and she was so tough and resilient. She never broke down on me because she had been built properly and with care. I must admit that the learning journey was tough but that was the main thing I took from the project -that in order to successfully create something, it must be built properly and with care.

The same can be said for housing – I used to live in an ex-council house and it was bulletproof. It had been built so well and cleverly the builders had had pride in their work. Then I moved to a new-build house which was brand new on a brand new housing estate and it was terrible. Walls paper-thin and when a car drove past, you could feel it through the floor.

The problem with not building a house properly and with care is that it is destined to fail. It looked lovely on the photos and when it was new, it had the appearance of being competently constructed but as soon as it began to be tested, the cracks began to show…literally.

All of this brings me on to what I really want to talk about today – the extreme fragility of the Scottish Prison Service resulting from it not being built properly and with care.

The thing is that the SOS has become a house of cards and has so very many single points of failure. A prime example f this is the transport which reached breaking point last year when the private supplier of transport simply failed to deliver on their contracted duties. Hospital transfers were missed, attendance at funerals cancelled at the last minute and transfers to other prisons not fulfilled. So it became like air traffic or the trains following a major weather event – a complete mess with resources in the wrong place ad very difficult to sort out.

Perhaps, though, the worst element is progression. Progression to less secure conditions is reliant on a stream of risk-assessments, meetings, forms and tests and because they are all reliant on each other, when one of them isn’t completed, the whole progression system fails. The result is people don’t progress when they should so are less likely to achieve parole which has the knock-on effect of overcrowding and financial issues.

I believe this is the single biggest factor at the heart of the problems with the prison system in Scotland and if I were the Justice Secretary, I would be demanding improvement in this area. I’d be telling prisons to sort out the building blocks at the beginning of the progression journey, get the risk assessments done as early as possible which inform the Generic Programme Assessments, then the applications to the Risk Manageent Team so prisoners progress according to the timelines published.

If progression is sorted then the knock-on effect on overcrowding, finances, completion of programmes and, ultimately, re-offending would be significant and that would result in a fairer, healthier, safer Scotland.

NaN.