About SPARC and Why We Are Responding

SPARC (Scottish Prisoner Advocacy and Research Collective) is a peer-led organisation rooted in lived experience and professional expertise. Our team is composed of individuals who have served long-term or life sentences in Scotland, many of whom have spent years navigating the progression system, parole, and community supervision. In addition to this lived experience, members of SPARC are also researchers, postgraduate students, community advocates, and frontline practitioners with in-depth knowledge of Scotland’s prison system.

We are responding to this call for evidence because the questions posed by the Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission directly reflect the issues we confront daily in our advocacy work. Our unique contribution is that we are not simply observers or analysts of the system; we are people who have lived it and now work daily to support others as they move through it.

Over the past several years, SPARC has supported people in custody and under supervision, as well as their families. We provide practical advocacy, research-based insight, and policy critique grounded in real-world experience. Most of our work involves helping people navigate progression, parole, recall, and post-release supervision systems. Systems that are often opaque, punitive, and inconsistent.

What we have seen, and what this submission will argue, is that the current prison policy landscape in Scotland fails to serve the principles of justice, rehabilitation, or public safety. Instead, it increasingly operates as a set of disconnected risk management processes that punish vulnerability, reinforce inequality, and sever people from the support they need to move forward.

We also believe any conversation about sentencing and prison reform must centre those most affected. The voices of people in prison, people on licence, and the families who support them have too often been absent from national policy discussions. This submission aims to change that by offering both evidence and testimony, rooted not only in professional advocacy but in personal insight.

Our members understand the real impact of policy decisions because we have lived through them. We know how it feels to be denied progression because a programme is not available. We know the fear and uncertainty of being on licence under vague and overreaching conditions. We know what it means to support someone who is recalled for a technical breach and returns to prison for years, not because of a new offence, but because of a missed appointment or a failed drug test during a period of crisis.

This is why SPARC exists. 

Moreover, this is why we are responding: to ensure that the next phase of Scotland’s criminal justice policy does not repeat the mistakes of the past, but builds a system that is transparent, proportionate, and humane, and one that centres lived experience as a source of insight and accountability.

Question 1: Community Sentencing

Context

Community sentences in Scotland are often framed as alternatives to custody, but in practice, they tend to replicate the same punitive and risk-averse logics found in prison. Rather than enabling rehabilitation, addressing structural disadvantage, or promoting accountability, these sentences are frequently shaped by risk assessment tools, standardised compliance requirements, and bureaucratic constraints.

People subject to Community Payback Orders (CPOs), Drug Treatment and Testing Orders (DTTOs), probation, drug court orders, or other community-based court disposals are often struggling with addiction, homelessness, trauma, or mental ill health. However, these underlying issues are rarely addressed within the scope of the sentence itself. Instead, individuals are set up to fail by rigid conditions that penalise the circumstances that contributed to their offence.

Despite rhetorical commitment to diversion and non-custodial measures, Scotland continues to imprison people at one of the highest rates in Western Europe. This is often the case, with short custodial sentences still regularly imposed for offences better addressed in the community, if support is in place to address the broader issues that result in offending.

Public and Judicial Attitudes

One of the enduring problems with community-based sanctions is public perception and how the judiciary frames these sentences. Courts frequently begin from the assumption that custody is the appropriate starting point, and community disposal is something an individual is “lucky” to receive. This framing is both inaccurate and harmful.

In most cases, prison should not even be part of the conversation. For offences such as:

• Petty theft
• Low-level drug possession
• Driving offences not involving serious harm
• Technical breaches of existing orders (e.g. failing drug tests or missing unpaid work sessions)

A custodial response is wholly inappropriate.

Community-based sentences should be the default, not the exception, and this position must be upheld regardless of a person’s housing status. People should not be sent to prison simply because they are homeless or their accommodation is considered unstable. Equally, prison should not be used as a substitute for mental health care or as a response to drug-related harms – these are public health issues and should be treated as such.

Forthcoming doctoral research by one of SPARC’s researcher-advocates, using data from drug treatment patients in Scotland between 2012 and 2015, shows that individuals who had experienced non-custodial contact with the CJS were significantly more likely to engage in high-risk drug use. This included (but was not limited to) injecting, polydrug use, and the use of dangerous substances such as illicit street valium, heroin, crack cocaine, and anti-epileptics. This group also tended to start using drugs and seek treatment at younger ages than their peers with no justice system contact^[1].

They were also much more likely to have never been employed or to be currently unemployed, to have experienced homelessness during the study period, or to be living in unstable housing. As a result, this group showed higher rates of drug-related deaths, more frequent involvement of multiple substances in the cause of death (poly-drug deaths), and increased prevalence of deaths involving cocaine, benzodiazepines, and even assault.

This is important because it shows that even low-level or community-based contact with the criminal justice system is closely associated with entrenched health and social inequalities. These individuals are not high-risk because of their offending; they are at risk because their lives have been shaped by trauma, poverty, and systemic exclusion. Many fall through the cracks of mainstream support systems and become further marginalised through criminal justice contact. If breach, relapse, or non-compliance are treated as personal failings instead of symptoms of systemic neglect, we will continue to criminalise need.

This evidence strengthens SPARC’s position that community sentencing must be grounded in support, not surveillance. Suppose we are serious about reducing harm, preventing reoffending, and addressing the root causes of criminalised behaviour. In that case, we must ensure that sentencing practices do not further destabilise people’s lives, particularly for those already pushed to the margins.

The Harms of Imprisonment

The alternative to community-based court disposals must also be kept in the frame here, as the experience of imprisonment is inherently harmful, which we must never lose sight of. Scottish research by Lesley Graham and colleagues^[2] found that people with a history of imprisonment are significantly more likely to die prematurely than others of the same age and gender in the general population. Crucially, this excess risk is only partially explained by deprivation, meaning that imprisonment itself contributes to early death.

According to Graham et al. (2015), the period immediately following release, particularly the first two weeks, is the highest risk window. However, other periods of transition also carry high risk, including:

• Initial remand
• Transfers between prisons
• Transition from remand to convicted status

These periods are strongly associated with self-inflicted deaths and deteriorating mental health (Armstrong and McGhee, 2019)^[3].

In 2024, Scotland recorded its highest-ever number of prison deaths: 64 in a single year. This included a record number of self-inflicted deaths on remand, particularly within the first month of being detained (Armstrong et al., 2025)^[4].

This raises a fundamental question: if more than half of people on remand do not receive a custodial sentence,^[5] why are they placed in high-risk custodial environments in the first place? Community alternatives should have been the first response. By sending people to prison – even temporarily – we sever them from community supports, jeopardise housing and employment, and expose them to significant and measurable risk of death.

SPARC’s Position

SPARC believes that community justice should be rooted in support, not surveillance, and in addressing the causes of harm, not merely responding to its symptoms. Community sentencing should reflect the realities of those who live under it and create space for people to genuinely move forward.

We therefore call for the following reforms:

• Shift from surveillance to care-based community justice models, grounded in trauma-informed, rights-based approaches.
• Reform CPOs, DTTOs, probation, and other community disposals to ensure they are proportionate, flexible, and responsive to individual needs, including regular court review hearings and reduced overreliance on unpaid work as a catch-all sanction.
• Decriminalise non-compliance linked to structural vulnerability, homelessness, relapse, or mental health crises, amongst other ‘non-compliance’ related reasons that are not crimes for resentencing an individual.
• Expand access to diversion, deferred sentencing, and problem-solving courts, focusing on early intervention, voluntary engagement, and collaborative planning.
• Embed peer mentors, community navigators, and lived experience practitioners in all stages of community justice – from sentencing to support and review.
• Ensure community justice is a genuine alternative to custody, not merely a punishment applied in the community or a pathway to breach and imprisonment.
• Ensure that drug use is consistently treated as a public health issue, including for people with criminal records or those currently in contact with the justice system. End punitive responses based on legal status, and reject abstinence-based conditions that force people to hide or modify their drug use to avoid detection. Such conditions increase harm and risk, including the use of dangerous, undetectable substances like illicit benzodiazepines and synthetic cannabinoids.

Additional Observations

• Community sentences will only be meaningful if local authorities are resourced to deliver a broad range of rehabilitative options, including housing support, health services, education, and employment pathways.
• People must not be punished for the absence of services. A sentence requiring someone to access non-existent or over-subscribed treatment is not just ineffective but unjust.
• The purpose of community sentencing should not be to control behaviour but to create the conditions for desistance and reintegration.
• Any effort to reform these processes must be shaped in collaboration with peer-led organisations such as SPARC, the Prison Expert Group, Aid and Abet, Next Chapter, and similar organisations, who are already working at the intersection of policy, support, and lived experience.

Question 2 – Bail and Remand

Context

The harms of remand are equivalent to, and often exceed, those associated with sentenced imprisonment. People on remand face:

• Loss of employment and housing
• Disruption of family ties and childcare
• Worsened mental and physical health
• Stigma, stress, and institutionalisation

New data shows that the time people spend on remand in Scotland has increased dramatically – in some cases, it has nearly tripled. According to Scottish Legal News (2023)^[6], while the median time on remand remained 21 days in 2022–23, the longest 10% of remand stays lasted 146 days or more, up from 64 days just a few years earlier. For those who transitioned to the sentenced population, the longest 10% of stays before sentencing reached 289 days or more.

This is an indefensible situation. While some have pointed to the pandemic and related court backlogs as a cause, this cannot remain the default explanation many years after public health restrictions were lifted. It is not a backlog issue – it is a policy failure.

People are now routinely held in some of the harshest conditions in the Scottish prison estate, with less access to purposeful activity, fewer opportunities for time out of cell, and minimal support, for months on end, often without being convicted of a crime.

However, as noted above, more than half of the people on remand do not receive a custodial sentence – a figure that rises to 70% for women. The implication is stark: people are being exposed to extreme psychological and physical harm for offences that, ultimately, are deemed not severe enough to warrant imprisonment.

The risk to life is real. In 2024, Scotland recorded a record number of prison deaths – 64 in total – including a record number of self-inflicted deaths on remand, many within the first month of detention (Armstrong et al., 2025)^[7]. These deaths correlate strongly with periods of transition highlighted above, uncertainty and lack of hope, and institutional dislocation.

To detain people for months in such conditions, in full knowledge of the risk to their lives, their health, and their family stability – and then not sentence them to prison at all – is not just inefficient, it is unconscionable. In SPARC’s view, it is a scandal that demands immediate and decisive reform.

Moreover, this is all before considering that these people are innocent until proven guilty—something we have lost sight of.

We therefore call for the following reforms:

• A statutory presumption against the use of remand for non-violent offences, with clear and limited exceptions based on demonstrated risk of serious harm.
• An absolute prohibition on the use of remand where the sole justification is homelessness, unstable accommodation, or unavailability of services.
• Nationally resourced and locally available alternatives to remand, including supervised bail, supported accommodation, and peer-led bail navigation services.
• Mandatory judicial review of all remand decisions within seven days of initial detention, with ongoing review every 14 days thereafter.
• A requirement for courts to publicly justify any remand decision that results in custody longer than 30 days, especially where no conviction is ultimately secured.
• Data transparency: publish detailed statistics on remand usage, including average duration, eventual sentence outcome, gender and racial disparities, and use of alternatives.
• Structured activity, health care, and rehabilitation supports for those held on remand are on par with those provided to sentenced prisoners.
• A discharge grant and reintegration support for anyone released from remand after 30 days or more, mirroring the support available to sentenced prisoners.
• Stronger enforcement of the presumption of innocence in public discourse and institutional practice, including court and prison staff training.
• Any effort to reform these processes must be shaped in collaboration with peer-led organisations such as SPARC, the Prison Expert Group, Aid and Abet, Next Chapter, and similar organisations, who are already working at the intersection of policy, support, and lived experience.

Question 3 – release from prison

Context

Release from custody in Scotland is often delayed, not because of ongoing risk or new offending, but due to systemic failures: inaccessible programmes, rigid parole criteria, and institutional bottlenecks in progression. These delays contribute directly to over-tariff detention, chronic institutionalisation, and a significant risk of mortality post-release. People are expected to evidence readiness for release through consistent engagement with risk management procedures – often while enduring impoverished, restrictive conditions and limited access to the interventions and supports necessary to demonstrate ‘progression’. A growing cohort of people is subject to recall to custody for technical breach of licence conditions – not for new offences, but for administrative non-compliance, relapse, or behaviours linked to unmet need. These returns to custody are avoidable, costly, and deeply damaging.

We have advocated for people in prison and their families at SPARC for several years. By far, the largest proportion of our advocacy work concerns people trying to navigate the progression system, seeking access to programmes, clarity on parole timelines, or support with recall. Therefore, our contribution to this consultation is not anecdotal but grounded in sustained professional experience with the substantive issues. In addition, three members of SPARC have themselves served life sentences and have been subject to the whole progression and parole system. This includes experiences of blocked progression, over-tariff detention, constant risk of recall to custody, and release under supervision. That combination of professional advocacy and lived experience means we are best placed to help others through it and to comment on where policy and practice must change.

Our advocates’ recurring concern is the lack of transparency, communication, and support for families and people in custody from professionals within the prison estate. This is true across the public sector (Scottish Prison Service-run establishments) and the private sector. Information about progression and parole is challenging to access, inconsistent between establishments, and often confusing or incorrect.

The system is skewed in all the wrong directions. While we understand the need for structured risk assessment and administrative processes, we must rethink the overreliance on box-ticking. People are frequently held back by minor failings that have little bearing on future risk, even when they are due to be released without licence conditions within a matter of months. The notion that release should only follow a perfect institutional record is incompatible with the purpose of a determinate sentence.

Regarding recall, we believe there must be an urgent re-evaluation of its functioning. People who are recalled have already served the punishment part of their sentence. They should not be required to reapply for parole in the usual way, as though they were starting from square one. We need to start thinking differently, so that punishment fits the crime and people are not continuously punished for offences that often happened decades ago. No one is the same person they were 20 years ago, and that should be reflected in both policy and practice. Judge people on the mistakes they are making now, and first look to support them rather than sending them back into an overcrowded prison estate, which, for many, is the site of previous trauma. All of this to then rerelease them with little or no support to reverse the damage done, with many recalls spending years in prison for not being abstinent from drugs or administrative breaches, as opposed to committing new offences. 

There also needs to be a frank conversation about the experience of being on a licence. Parole is not just a legal status – it shapes people’s lives for years after release. For most people, even those not living lives their social workers disapprove of, parole meetings feel like police interviews. We have had multiple advocacy clients tell us this directly, and in one tragic case, an individual we supported died by suicide following a particularly distressing period of supervision (this example is shared here with the full consent of their next of kin).

Almost every client we have worked with has reported being reluctant to seek help with their mental health or substance use because they know these disclosures may be used against them in parole reports. The idea that parole officers are there to offer care and support is fundamentally incompatible with their power to recall people based on the very things they claim to support. It is our view at SPARC that you cannot be the person responsible for ripping apart families through your institutional role, while simultaneously claiming to be a care provider. You are either one or the other; the people we advocate for have expressed this many times.

This is not abstract for us. Even those out of custody for nearly a decade still feel this contradiction. A postgraduate researcher with a stable family life and no recall history for 8 years still receives random home checks, during which a parole officer arrives unannounced, asks whether he still lives there, and questions whoever answers the door, including his children. Another is still subject to a licence condition prohibiting them from entering a licensed premises unless accompanied by their wife. These practices do not reflect risk – they reflect a culture of control. Our families, instead of being a source of support, are treated as state agents responsible for monitoring us: making sure we live where we say we live, or accompanying us to places as a condition of our liberty. This is even though neither had addiction issues in custody, had absconded from custody or their family homes, or had breached their license other than self-medicating before being diagnosed with severe complex PTSD for which they received a warning.

It is worse that local parole officers are given broad discretion in interpreting national conditions. While national guidance may suggest that random home visits or drug testing are for high-risk individuals, local practice often expands this by default. When we ask for clarity, we are told, “This is how we do things here, and other local authorities should be doing the same.” Suppose this is how people with stable housing, stable family life, and a low risk of offending are being treated. What is happening to people who would benefit from support, not surveillance?

SPARC’s research into the very long-term prison population in Scotland (McGhee et al. 2022) 8 showed that the system of parole, as well as the progression through the prison estate, in Scotland is increasingly dysfunctional. In 2022, more than 1,000 people served 10 years or more sentences, comprising 19% of Scotland’s prison population – a higher proportion than England and Wales. Only 12% of lifers are now granted parole, down from 30% two decades ago. Lifers must move through the National Top End and Open Estate regimes to demonstrate readiness. However, space shortages, staff delays, and programme access issues block these transitions, often pushing people past their release eligibility. At the time of writing, Castle Huntly – Scotland’s only open estate for men – was operating at half capacity despite long waiting lists. Risk assessment tools such as LS/CMI and RoSH are often applied inconsistently or punitively, contributing to subjective and opaque barriers to release.

Public discourse on parole in Scotland has become increasingly risk-averse, shaped by rare but high-profile cases of reoffending on licence. As a result, the threshold for demonstrating readiness for release is now exceptionally high, particularly for lifers, who must evidence not only reduced risk but also consistent engagement, abstinence, and pro-social behaviour in highly controlled environments. Parole failure is not uncommon for people who fail drug tests, even if no other issues (such as violence or misconduct) are present. The presence of addiction is treated as a standalone marker of risk, despite limited predictive value. Recall rates have increased by 36% since 2010, primarily driven by technical or administrative breaches rather than new offending. This creates a cycle in which people are denied progression due to rigid or misapplied risk criteria, released with minimal support, recalled for minor breaches, and returned to custody – often indefinitely.

The burden is on the person in custody to prove they are safe to release. SPARC believes this burden should fall on the state: if the punishment part of the sentence has been served, continued detention must be justified by evidence of serious ongoing risk. Otherwise, people should be released. Release decisions should be timely, transparent, and reviewable. Scotland’s release and recall system fails to adhere to the principles of fairness, rehabilitation, and proportionality. It punishes people for institutional failures, for relapse rooted in trauma, and for behaviours beyond their control. SPARC urges the Commission to recommend a fundamental overhaul of progression, parole, and post-release supervision – ending over-tariff detention, ensuring fair and proportionate licence conditions, and minimising preventable, punitive recall.

We therefore call for the following reforms:

• A presumption in law that individuals should be released on their Parole Qualifying Date unless there is clear, documented evidence of serious ongoing risk.
• A new framework for recall that recognises the punishment part of the sentence has already been served and does not require people to restart the parole process from the beginning.
• There is a statutory presumption against recall for non-criminal breaches, such as relapse, missed appointments, or behavioural deterioration, that do not pose a risk to others.
• National guidance to clarify the limits of local discretion in parole licence enforcement, with independent oversight of how conditions are interpreted and applied across different local authorities.
• An end to using risk assessment tools as gatekeepers for progression when programme access, staffing shortages, and institutional factors make these thresholds impossible to meet.
• Mandatory, transparent review of licence conditions for long-term prisoners who have demonstrated sustained compliance and stability in the community.
• Recognition that support and care cannot be delivered by the same actors responsible for surveillance and enforcement; where parole functions as a monitoring regime, it cannot also claim to be therapeutic.
• Nationally consistent access to mental health and substance use services that are confidential and cannot be used against individuals in risk reports or recall proceedings.
• Any individual on licence must have access to independent advocacy and legal support during parole reviews, licence variations, or breach proceedings. 
• Any effort to reform these processes must be shaped in collaboration with peer-led organisations such as SPARC, the Prison Expert Group, Aid and Abet, Next Chapter, and similar organisations, who are already working at the intersection of policy, support, and lived experience.

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^[1] The context being that these drug taking behaviours as well as these substances are all frequently cited by National Records of Scotland as driving Scotlands record high drug deaths – for e.g. see https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-in-2023/. Accessed 21/05/2025

^[2] https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/25/5/879/2398737. Accessed 24/05/2025

^[3] https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SCCJR-Mental-Health-and-Wellbeing-of-Young-People-in-Custody_Evidence-Review.pdf. Accessed 23/05/2025.

^[4] https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Still-Nothing-to-See-Here-2022.pdf. Accessed 23/05/2025.

^[5] Howard League Scotland “Remand”. https://howardleague.scot/policy/remand. Accessed 23/05/2025

^[6] https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/prison-population-remains-stable. Accessed 23/05/2025.

^[7] https://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Still-Nothing-to-See-Here-2022.pdf. Accessed 23/05/2025.