Debating the future of Scottish imprisonment, 2008-2020

Abstract

This thesis explores political struggle to change imprisonment in a post-devolution, nation-building Scotland. It focuses on key moments within which conflicts over the role of the prison in the ‘new’ Scotland were crystalised: in the emergence of ‘decarceration consensus’ in 2008, and during the project of trying to transform the Scottish Prison Service (‘SPS’) between 2012 and 2020. Both trajectories are often described as having failed to substantially change the role of imprisonment or the high prison population, and this project recovers some of the key boundaries and opportunities, hopes and disappointments, bound up in this sense of failure.

The research consisted of a review of key texts connected to these events, in addition to in-depth oral history or ‘career story’ interviews with actors central to Scottish imprisonment debates. Both the fieldwork and analysis were orientated towards narrative inquiry – the narratives encoded in texts, in the recollections of interviewees, and in what emerged as some fairly fixed narratives around the Scottish nation. Drawing from developments in the sociology of punishment, this project questions the degree to which any place can claim to have a single, intrinsic, penal (or national) identity.

Exploring the early post-devolution years leading up to 2008, I identify key areas of path-paving for a sense of sudden change, as well as certain explicit and implicit boundaries to what change could be pursued. The construction and then mobilization of decarceration consensus revealed a set of constrained sensibilities and discourses around the prison not immediately apparent in the story of national and penal change. I argue that the decarceration consensus that emerged in 2008 was limited in important ways, and that the place of the prison in Scottish society remained conflicted. This shaped subsequent efforts to transform the prison estate, during which SPS embodied and reflected imprisonment’s contested and contradictory role. With significant conflicts around 'Scottishness’, the prison, and those imprisoned unresolved – even suppressed – efforts for change have been firmly bounded. The thesis concludes that certain longstanding narratives around Scottish society, and even the narrative of consensus itself, created a somewhat ‘imaginary’ space for imprisonment change in this period.