Angela Constance: I’m not completely naive or blind to the reality that we will always need prisons

In her eighth ministerial brief since being elected in 2007, Angela Constance does not have her troubles to seek. From reduced police numbers and disputes over pay; to overcrowded prisons; controversial early release of offenders; rising homicide figures; an evolving crisis in legal aid funding; to a raging row over some of her proposed legal reforms like juryless rape trials which have now been axed, it’s hard to see where some of the positives lie.

But Constance is a woman not short of optimism, energy, or a desire to make change for the better. She has longevity in government on her side and experience across a wide range of ministerial portfolios spanning everything from education; social security; children; skills; drugs policy and now justice. As a result, she approaches the justice brief holistically, seeing the various facets of the portfolio being interconnected, parts of a jigsaw and on a continuum. Her background as a prison social worker informs her direction and she frequently points to her upbringing in West Lothian during periods of economic uncertainty and domestic upheaval as the lived experience that turbo charges her passion for change.

“You could describe me as a fixer. It’s true, I like to fix things. I wouldn’t ever run away from a problem, and I think that does go back to my childhood. I grew up with lots of change. My dad is now dead but I’m sure my mum wouldn’t mind me saying this, my parents married very young, and they divorced when they were very young. It’s complicated but let’s just say that there’s a lot of divorce and separation in my family and yes, both my parents remarried more than once. As a result, we moved around a lot as kids, and we changed schools and where we lived a lot. I’m the eldest of five, there’s myself and my sister, a wee brother, and then I have two half-brothers and a large extended family. We have what you would call a blended family. 

“I stayed with my mum, and at times I stayed with my dad. And unemployment was also a big feature in the family in the 80s. My father did a lot of construction work and driving heavy machinery, and for a lot of his work he worked, particularly latterly, in opencast coal mines. There was a lot of unemployment in the 80s and in West Lothian it was running at one in four. Now that is not just a statistic for me – my dad was one of those one in four men in West Lothian without work. He always had worked but for two years of his adult life – and my teenage years – he went through a period of unemployment when I was actually living with him and so, I would been 12 to 15, and I really saw the hard consequences of that. Two years is a long period, and I personally know what unemployment does to communities and to families, and I know what it did to him.

“What was equally influential on me in terms of looking at how life worked was also my mother’s experience of employment. I look at her life journey and she had better qualifications than my father, but, apart from when he was unemployed, he always had a better paid job. Her career would have been greatly affected by having children and she had lots of part-time work when we were little.

“I saw my mother work most of her life, struggle with childcare, struggle with things like flexible working. She, predominantly, worked in caring or nursing work and I saw the impact that had on her own health, so I like to think that my own family experience means that I am well-versed in the reality of life.

“Putting all of that in a positive, I think it’s also why I cope with change well. I’m not fazed by change. I’m pretty resilient. And I adapt. I see change as a part of life, but if you ask if it’s what I wanted for my child, changing schools, moving house, no, I didn’t want that for him and that’s not what he has had.

“But having said that, whatever was going on for me as a child, I always knew we were loved, which, you know, despite all the change, despite my parents separating, despite periods of financial hardship, I never doubted for a minute that we were loved. That counts for a lot and gives you a strong sense of belonging.”

The period of the 1980s that Constance describes has taken on a special status in Scotland’s political history – Constance calls the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, a “nationalist recruiting sergeant” for much of the SNP and it was the cause of independence – the chance to take control of what she calls the levers affecting her community’s lives – that drew Constance in at a very young age.

“I have early memories,” she smiles, “primary school memories, of the 1979 referendum and yes, this is going to make me sound pretty sad, but I’ve been interested in politics since I was about eight or nine. I don’t come from a political family. I obviously grew up in a mining area in the 70s and 80s but my family weren’t politically active. My mother, by chance, voted SNP, and my dad always voted Labour because, in his view, that’s what working men did. But my interest in politics was sparked by the first referendum in ‘79. I was in primary four and we had a debate about Scotland’s self-government, and I was on the yes side to what was then for a Scottish Assembly. I was just instinctively a nationalist.

“That view has never wavered. It doesn’t mean I’m not critical, but that belief in self-government has never changed. It’s obviously grown and developed with my understanding of the political world and reality. Fair to say, I would have been quite opinionated about politics as a child. And I always say to the kids that come into the parliament that when I was at school, I always wanted to be a parliamentarian, and that I wanted to represent my home area, which I now do. And remember, this is a time before the Scottish Parliament even existed so heaven knows where the thought even came from, but that changed once I had left school and had gone to university and knew then that I wanted to do something else, but also you maybe lack the confidence that you had as a child when you start to see more of the world or mix with others. 

“I think, for me, and it does go back to confidence, I don’t think I would have had the confidence in my 20s to stand for election. I remember one of my friends that I was at university with saying he was going away to do candidate assessment, and I should come too, and I was like, ‘Oh no’. I just couldn’t at that stage, it felt like that wasn’t for the likes of me. I don’t know whether that was about being working class or being female, but I couldn’t go for candidate assessment to be a parliamentary candidate for West Lothian at that stage when I was probably just 20. I did do it later on in my 20s and because of what I do now, I’m really glad I’ve done other things before politics.

“I was the first person in my family to go to university and to be honest, I really only went to prove a point, to prove that I could. I changed my mind a lot about what I wanted to do post university, but at that time, my mum was a full-time carer for her husband, who had a long-term degenerative illness and there was a good deal of social work involvement, in terms of community care, assessments, respite and all of that, and that sparked my interest in social work. I wasn’t living at home at the time but seeing the burden of caring, and caring for a loved one, really left an impression on me, and to be fair, my mother would certainly have had lots of frustrations and a very personal critique of the social work intervention and support that she was receiving, or that her husband and her were not receiving. That sparked my interest.

“I know I do harp on about being a social worker, but I was a prison-based social worker and that matters to what I do now. It gives me a really personal perspective. I worked in three prisons, Glenochil, Friarton and Perth Prison, as a prison social worker. I also did some work with adults in the community with learning difficulties before I went into criminal justice and forensic mental health and then I went to work for six years at the State Hospital in Carstairs, which is a secure hospital, not a prison, and that’s an important distinction. I know it’s a long time ago, but I still think of myself as a social worker as opposed to a politician and that’s because I think our early working life is part of our identity, and while I have never walked in the shoes of a prison officer – their job is very different to that of a prison-based social worker – I would like to think that I have a grounded understanding and insight into the reality of prison life and the perils of an over-populated prison system.

“So, when you ask me what keeps me awake at night,  the prison population always concerns me greatly. Prison officers are on the frontline. Not just prison officers, but there are frontline staff in a justice system that put themselves on the frontline, day in, day out, for us and I think the least they can expect from the politicians and me as the justice secretary is to put myself forward and support them.

Angela Constance photographed for Holyrood by Anna Moffat

“There can be a tendency to look at justice in its component parts, as opposed to an end-to-end justice journey. In terms of what success would look like for me in my role, it is many things but certainly about modernising our criminal justice system. That must mean better use of technology such as the progress with the digital evidence sharing capability system which has now been launched and that will have a transformative effect on how evidence is shared across the justice system, from crime scene to courtroom. Building on that there have been the developments, that actually have been traditionally led, on summary case management, that’s all about earlier resolution of cases and actually reducing unnecessary citations to court. Rooted throughout that is a much more trauma-informed approach to justice.

“So, instead of looking at people as witnesses, or as victims, or as pieces of evidence, that first and foremost we’re looking at them as individuals. We don’t want a justice system that re-traumatises people. And I suppose what I’m particularly focused on is our prison population. I hope I’ve demonstrated this in other portfolios that I’ve had the privilege of serving in: that I will own difficult issues. If there’s a problem, I will own it. I won’t seek to hide from it or edge away from it. I’d much rather tackle things full on. I very plainly said that the prison population is too high and when I worked in prisons, more than 20 years ago, our prison population was five to five and a half thousand. Today, it sits at 8,241 and that’s a problem.

“We can’t build our way out of this issue. We do need to replace our prisons, we have an ageing estate, but we are now making good progress with HMP Highland, which is the replacement of HMP Grampian, there’s been good progress made with the women’s estate, the community custody units, and the new women’s prison, HMP and YOI Stirling.

“So, we do need to modernise our estate, but again, I have been transparent and blunt about this, we won’t build our way out of this. If we keep building additional prisons, we will just fill them, and we need to have the courage to talk about the evidence and outcomes. I know some people may find this a bit more of a sterile, academic approach to politics, but politics and public service needs to be rooted in what actually works, what will work to keep people in communities safer, and it’s a lazy assumption to assume that a very high prison population keeps us all safe when, while absolutely prisons are there to punish, to protect, they are also there to reintegrate and rehabilitate. Bear in mind, most prisoners will actually, at the end of the day, return to the community, they need to be prepared for that. There are more people who could be serving robust community justice sentences, and we could be doing more to rehabilitate people within a prison system if our population is at more manageable levels.

“There’s no silver bullet to any of this and we’ve got to be prepared to see it through. I am prepared to see it through. And again, we’ve got to think of the justice system in its entirety, and we’ve got to think about people’s journeys through life. We need to build on the success that we’ve made with the introduction of electronically monitored bail and the numbers have also gone up in terms of supervised bail. The numbers for community sentencing have gone up, but so have the numbers of incarceration. So, at the end of the day, we need to actually have the courage to engage with communities that are affected most by crime about what will work to make them safer. There is nothing soft about a robust community justice disposal. 

“I hope this doesn’t sound in any way flippant – but as a student social worker one of the placements I was on was in the criminal justice team in Dalkeith, and in those days you had a community service order or a probation order. I was supervising a young man on a probation order who just would get so exasperated he would say to me, ‘I would rather have done six months in Saughton than come and see you every week’. I know I sound as if I’m being flippant, but I’m just trying to make the point that if people have to be confronted with their behavior, challenged about it, and if people have to actually work to make reparations to a community, there’s actually nothing soft about that.

“And will you get a better outcome? Well, the evidence tells us you will get a better outcome in terms of re-offending. I know we’re always going to need prisons, right? I’m not completely naive or blind to the reality that we will always need prisons, but our prisons need to be rehabilitating and reintegrating. We also need a better use of home detention curfew. You can release people on a license, on a curfew, on a tag, and we will pilot GPS technology to run alongside that. 

“The reality is that prison disrupts. Now sometimes in terms of risk of harm and seriousness, you just have to disrupt, you have to incarcerate people, and at times there’s no alternative. There’s no safe, appropriate alternative. But if I tell you that an organisation, Families Outside, recently told me that in Scotland today there are more children impacted by parental imprisonment than divorce, what does that tell you? It tells you we are causing other harms.

“And I know there’s a lot of work done in developing very sophisticated offending behaviour programmes, I was involved in delivering some of those back in the day, but what are the things that help most to keep folk on the straight and narrow? It’s purpose in life. Whether that’s work, education, volunteering, a sense of belonging, relationships, family, not being isolated, stability in terms of a home, these are the things we need to look at. We sometimes focus on psychological interventions, which are important – and obviously the social worker in me doesn’t want to offend the psychologist, but we need to remember that actually, some of this is about meeting people’s basic needs. We also need our system to do better with victims. The system is overly complex, needs to be simpler, and people need to be able to access from that point of where the police are involved to when the case is dealt with, and whether somebody’s imprisoned or released, that victims get better information throughout that process.

“We’ve also got to look at our justice system in the context of a whole government. And you will hear prison officers talk about this on a daily basis. So, the issues that they are having to respond to, the people whose needs they are having to respond to, the people who they are having to both care for and keep in secure environments are very often the same people who have had other issues at a much earlier stage in their life. People who work in prisons often feel that they are treated as the end of the line, that they are picking up the problems and the issues that other people and other services have failed to grapple with.

“We need to stop seeing prison as the end of the line. It’s not the end of the line. What matters in prison matters to us all. It shouldn’t be out of sight, out of mind and I actually welcome the increased scrutiny. I actually welcome the increased media interest on the reality of prison life, because there are some myths around about so-called soft touch justice. There is nothing soft-touch about HMP Barlinnie. There is nothing soft-touch about having a prison population of 8,241, as it stands today. But I also have to recognise that this isn’t smart justice. There’s a better way of doing things and that’s where we are going.”

Constance barely pauses for breath, but at the core of that journey to “better” was the introduction of the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill earlier this year which proposed a whole raft of reforms designed to put victims at the heart of the justice system. Constance described the proposed legislation as “landmark”. However, the proposals – including juryless trials, a reduction to the numbers on a jury and the end of the uniquely Scottish ‘not proven’ verdict – sparked wide-ranging controversy and stinging criticism from the legal sector and also from the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee. It led to an early call from defence lawyers to boycott a trial-without-jury pilot designed specifically to aid higher conviction rates in cases of rape and sexual assault, and the day after our interview, the Scottish Government announces that the plan has now been axed. This comes on top of a long-running row over legal aid fees which has led to the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association launching industrial action and boycotting certain cases.

Constance sits alongside Kate Forbes and John Swinney at Holyrood | Alamy

And on the day that Constance and I are speaking, one of Scotland’s leading criminal defence lawyers, Aamer Anwar, announces his firm will take on no new legal aid work. Anwar said: “It’s impossible to continue. After 25 years of being a lawyer, I’ve seen the legal aid system decimated, and the poor, vulnerable, and weak are unable to get justice.”

The job of justice secretary must sometimes feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole, and I ask Constance if she believes her proposed reforms will offer a panacea to the myriad of issues currently facing her.

“I don’t see anything as a panacea. I mean, one of the things about being a social worker is you tend not to view life as two dimensional or as black and white. You obviously have principles and ethics that guide you, but I suppose, if there’s one disadvantage of being a social worker and now a politician is that, if you see life as a bit more nuanced, you tend to fall between two stools, and you annoy everybody, as opposed to just one side.”