By Tony O’Reilly-
Reducing the number of prison inmates in Scotland will help staff feel much safer, the Scottish prison association has said.
The Scottish Prison Service revealed on Sunday that the number of prisoners was 8,430 last Tuesday, though by Friday it had dropped to 8,391. Scotland’s prisons were only designed to hold 7,805 people.
The disturbing increase in prisoners is mainly due to the long-term sentences of four years or more, with the long-term population rising to 4012 – more than 600 higher than two years ago.
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This follows a period of emergency early release last summer and the introduction of the Prisoners (Early Release) Scotland Act 2025 earlier this year.
The Act changed the point of release for all eligible short-term prisoners from 50% to 40% of their sentence, but the prison population has continued to rise sharply since then.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland today, Phil Fairlie, the assistant general secretary of the Scottish Prison Officers Association, said: “The biggest worry for us just now is staff, I think, feel unsafe inside the prisons, I don’t think they feel they’ve got proper control.
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“I don’t mean that the prisons are out of control, but they are working their socks off every single day to try and keep that control.
“They have been doing incredible work remarkably well for a long, long period of time and they are due enormous credit for that, but they are human beings, they’re not robots.”
It comes after a trade union released a report based on a survey and focus groups with staff.
Reflecting on the report, Fairlie added: “The report talks about increasing staff sickness levels, more abuse and assaults on staff, increasing tensions in the prisons and additional pressure on staff, so it’s a pretty scary and bleak picture that staff are painting.”
Fairlie’s comments come as regulations are due to be debated by Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee to bring forward a third early release scheme for inmates to ease overcrowding on the prison estate.
Ahead of the vote, Fairlie said the resulting relief on the system would be welcome, but he warned it will only be “temporary” without wider reform.
Reducing the number of prisoners, he added, would make a “significant difference” to staff being able to do what is required of them on a daily basis.
He continued: “The issue for us is this is now the third time in this position and the relief we get from that, which is welcome, is very short-lived.
“We do start to see those numbers creeping back up again – if it’s not the same people coming back, it is more people being added to the prisoner population.
“It is going to take a much more fundamental change to the system than that.”
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