Scotland is having another conversation about sentencing, parole, and prison. A new Commission has been set up, and another call for evidence has been issued, and the same questions resurface:

• Why do we imprison so many people?

• What can we do differently?

• What would it mean to treat people with dignity, even when they have broken the law?

These are good questions, but too often, they’re answered by people who haven’t felt the full weight of the system themselves. We at SPARC submitted evidence because we’ve lived it and supported others living through it. And if voices from organisations like ours aren’t in the conversation, the following policies will never get it right.

Why We Responded

The Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission asks the right questions about remand, release, community sentencing, and whether Scotland’s justice system is working. But these questions can’t be answered in spreadsheets, court transcripts or media releases.

They have to be answered by those who feel the consequences, either directly or through supporting a family member, loved one, or a friend who has.

When someone is sent to prison because they don’t have a home address for bail, that’s not just a new file opened on PR2 (SPS internal prisoner records system). It’s a person being taken from their community, losing their job, missing their kid’s birthday, and stepping into an environment known to increase the risk of self-harm and early death.

When someone is recalled to custody after five years in the community because they failed a drug test, with no new charge and no harm caused, that’s not an error of compliance. It’s a failure of compassion, and it’s a system that doesn’t know how to support people in distress without resorting to control.

As a Community Interest Company, we are legally and morally committed to advocating for the well-being of our community, and this call for evidence speaks directly to its needs and realities. Our responsibility is to respond and ensure that people most affected by the justice system are represented in policy conversations that shape their lives.

What the Evidence Tells Us

One of our members recently completed a doctoral study using linked national data on more than 35,000 people who engaged with specialist drug treatment services in Scotland. The research looked at what happened to people over time, including whether they died during the follow-up period, and how this related to criminal justice contact, drug use, health needs, housing, and employment.

What it found was that people who had contact with the justice system, especially those who had spent time in prison, were much more likely to be dealing with a range of difficulties long before they appeared in a court, prison, or parole file. They were more likely to be unemployed, living in unstable accommodation, have started using drugs at a younger age, have a history of injecting, and to have had contact with services because of physical health, mental health, or alcohol-related problems.

Perhaps most importantly, the research found that it was these wider problems that were most closely linked to people dying during the study period. Criminal justice contact often appeared alongside poor outcomes, but much of that relationship reflected the fact that people in the justice system were already carrying a much heavier burden of disadvantage, ill health, and social exclusion.

In simple terms, the people we punish are often the ones already struggling the most.

The findings fit with what many people working in this area already know. By the time someone appears before a court, enters prison, or comes under supervision in the community, they have often spent years dealing with poverty, unstable housing, poor health, trauma, addiction, and a lack of support. These problems rarely exist on their own. They build up over time and feed into one another.

The study also found that drug-related deaths were more common among people with prison experience than among those with no recorded justice contact. Again, this wasn’t about one single factor. The highest risks were seen where multiple disadvantages overlapped.

This matters because too much of our justice system is still built around monitoring behaviour rather than addressing need. If the things putting people at risk are poor health, unstable housing, poverty, trauma, and problematic drug use, then more surveillance, stricter conditions, and harsher penalties are unlikely to solve the problem.

The evidence points in a different direction. People are more likely to succeed when they have somewhere stable to live, access to healthcare and treatment, meaningful support, and a system that responds to setbacks with help rather than punishment.

We continue to punish need rather than respond to it.

In our submission, we said that community sentencing must be grounded in support rather than surveillance. If we want people to succeed, we have to build systems that help them, not ones that punish them for falling short of unrealistic expectations and ultimately end up in prison for “non-compliance”.

What We See Every Day

At SPARC, we spend most of our time supporting people stuck in the “progression” system, waiting years in prison for a programme, a transfer, or a parole board that keeps pushing their case back.

We work with people on parole who are afraid to be honest about their mental health because they know it could be used against them. We’ve seen licence conditions so strict that people can’t go to a shop unless they’re with their wife. We’ve worked with families turned into state monitors, forced to account for where their loved one is, what they’re doing, and who they’re with.

These are not isolated stories. They are patterns that highlight a system that confuses control with care and compliance with rehabilitation.

We supported one person (with permission to share this from their next of kin), who died by suicide after a period of intense and punitive licence supervision and a fear of being recalled if they were honest about the difficulties they were suffering. That is the human cost of a system that cannot distinguish between support and surveillance.

What Needs to Change

Our submission to the Commission outlines detailed reforms, but here’s the heart of it:

• No one should be remanded just because they’re homeless.

• No one should be recalled to custody just because they relapsed.

• Parole should not be a test of perfection.

• Support should not be conditional on silence or compliance.

• And justice should be something that helps people change, not something that traps them where they are.

But there’s one more thing we need to say: reform cannot happen without the voices and experiences of people who have been through it.

You cannot build trust without including those whose trust has been broken. You cannot design effective systems if you do not understand how they are used—and misused—in real life. Furthermore, you cannot claim to be building a fairer justice system if the people most affected by it remain excluded from the room.