No one was shocked by the revelation that prisoners used taxpayer-funded mobile phones to commit crime – apart from jail chiefs and ministers.
They assured us for months that it was a progressive, forward-thinking scheme that would help criminals behind bars to keep in touch with relatives.
Warnings about the pitfalls of handing out mobiles to inmates were brushed off, even as overwhelming evidence of widespread abuse piled up.
The inevitable volte-face came last year when the policy was scrapped and fixed landlines were installed in cells, but only after £6million had been wasted.
And the architect of this dangerously barmy initiative? Humza Yousaf, erstwhile First Minister, who was justice secretary when the phones were doled out.
Back in April 2020, in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, Mr Yousaf said the use of ‘free’ mobiles in prisons would be done in a way which is ‘practical and safe for those in custody, their families, and those in the wider community’.
The victims of the state-subsidised crimes which followed will have found these assurances hard to swallow, but they were backed up by Mr Yousaf’s then boss.
Nicola Sturgeon insisted in December 2020 that mobiles for prisoners were ‘important to rehabilitation, and rehabilitation is important to reducing offending and reoffending’ – when in fact the phones were enabling further criminality.
In September 2021, it emerged that 720 phones had been hacked by inmates, but Ms Sturgeon said this was news to her – and she’d look into it.
Two months later, she accepted there was evidence some handsets ‘had been tampered with’, but stressed that this had been detected as a result of ‘robust monitoring’. Remarkably, there was no U-turn until July 2023, when it was announced the scheme would be axed in favour of the in-cell landlines – at a cost of £8.5million.
Now a new report for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has revealed vulnerable inmates were bullied into handing over their mobiles to other prisoners.
Illicit SIM cards bypassed restrictions and more than 8,000 security breaches, including drug deals and hit jobs, were recorded.
In 2022, we reported details of a firebomb murder plot orchestrated behind bars using the ‘free’ phones, by a prisoner who acted like a ‘gangster’ as he sought to turn the streets of Greenock into a ‘war zone’.
One of the incidents – revenge attacks over the stabbing of the thug’s brother – involved the targeting of a flat with three people, including a child, inside.
It shouldn’t have taken Mystic Meg to work out that giving mobiles to violent thugs was a monumentally stupid and morally grotesque idea. Before the phones were handed over they had to make do with smuggling in their own handsets.
Signal-jamming technology to stop them being used wasn’t deployed as much as it could have been, if at all, apparently because law enforcement listened in on some of the calls – so the use of banned phones provided a mine of intelligence.
The idea of approved phones with only certain capabilities, supposedly allowing recipients to call pre-approved contacts, was attractive to jail managers as, in theory, it could contain the problem of illegally obtained handsets being deployed for criminal purposes.
As we now know, prisoners found a way of hijacking the official phones for their own nefarious ends. We are told, presumably with a straight face, that ‘lessons’ have been learned by SPS bosses following the fiasco – so that’s all right then – and that the in-cell landlines are a positive step in supporting family contact.
The people who claimed that equipping criminals with officially sanctioned phones was a worthwhile endeavour with minimal risk are now telling us that fixed landlines work like a dream and there is nothing to worry about.
Only pre-approved numbers can be dialled, but we were fobbed off with the same line first time around and disaster ensued.
The reality is that no lessons have been learned because soft-touch justice is hard-wired into our chaotic, failing penal system.
Mr Yousaf was justice secretary when hundreds of prisoners were let out during the Covid pandemic to free up space and limit the spread of the disease.
Some 142 of the 348 freed would later be returned to custody for an alarming list of suspected crimes involving attempted murder, serious assault, robbery and sex offences.
By contrast, under the Conservative Government south of the Border, only a small number of prisoners were released early during the pandemic, including pregnant inmates – after they were assessed as low-risk.
This shambles didn’t prevent Mr Yousaf’s promotion to the highest office in the land, via the health portfolio – well, basic competence has never been a deal-breaker for the SNP when it comes to the top jobs.
But memories are short among our political masters, and more than 500 prisoners have been freed early since June – this time because of overcrowding.
The SPS has said it hopes to publish information about the proportion of prisoners who reoffended after being granted ‘emergency early release’ by this month’s end.
For those unlucky enough to remain in jail, there’s the comfort of having a landline – which will soon be able to accept incoming calls – as well as video games consoles and televisions.
In 2022, around £500,000 was spent on TVs which are said to be ‘vital’ in the absence of ‘in-person contact with loved ones’, while prisoners pay a weekly fee for them out of their ‘wages’ – funded by the taxpayer.
Under legislation passed when Mr Yousaf was justice secretary (yes, his fingerprints are everywhere), prisoners serving sentences of a year or less, including sex offenders, can vote in Holyrood and council elections.
He also fast-tracked a bid to phase out jail terms of up to 12 months by introducing a ‘presumption’ against shorter sentences.
Other ludicrous guidelines devised by the Scottish Sentencing Council, set up by the SNP, mean young offenders – under the age of 25 – can be treated more leniently on the dubious grounds that their brains are still developing, so they merit special treatment.
It’s getting harder to be locked up, and for those who are, there are many compensatory perks.
A watchdog revealed in 2022 that prisoners at Castle Huntly in Perthshire – Scotland’s only open prison – were being treated to crazy golf in a ‘relaxing’ and ‘therapeutic’ environment.
In 2015, it emerged that prisoners at the same jail were allowed days out fly-fishing to help them relax.
The mental health and wellbeing of murderers and rapists have been prioritised at all times, while the core function of prison is little more than an afterthought.
Victims – and the taxpayers bankrolling these expensive freebies – deserve better than more of the SNP’s soft-touch lunacy.