Essay --

Since the early 20th century, the Scottish penal system has gone through numerous transformations as the society changes and grows, including the important period where Scotland struggled to create it’s own identity, separate from the rest of the UK. These developments have been pivotal in regards to the modernization of the Scottish Criminal Justice system, which is often described as being made up of a complex set of processes and involves many different bodies . Over the past decade, the main problem at hand is that Scotland, a relatively small country in the scheme of things, has a serious problem with imprisonment , meaning that we have a higher imprisonment rate than nearly anywhere else in Western Europe. Recent research has shown that it sends over twice as many people to prison than the similarly sized countries within Europe , but in a debate on penal policy in 2007, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill, stated that â€Å"the Government refuses to belie ve that the Scottish people are inherently bad or that there is any genetic reason why we should be locking up twice as many offenders as Ireland or Norway.† The aim of this essay will be to look at the recent changes within Scotland’s penal system, and whether this ‘imprisonment crisis’ has been the outcome of penal developments in the past. Following the completion of the Second World War, Scotland (and the rest of the UK) was a place where a boost in the welfare state led to penal welfarism being key, which Garland argues that ‘reform and social intervention were plausible responses to crime and that alternatives to prison were healthy’ . This ideology meant that during this period the overall consensus was that rehabilitation was more heavily used, as prison... ...h the modern society. The developments in penal reform and policies in Scotland have grown with the creation of modern Scotland. Devolution fundamentally changed the nature of criminal justice in Scotland, and the research as shown that increased political involvement and the need for has changed the penal policies over the past few decades. Pre-devolution it was clear that policy-making was carried out in partnership between civil servants and agencies with a rate of change, but the introduction of devolution propelled policy-making into an unstable and heavily politicised environment, which was never the case before, where it now answers to political expediency and the political cycle and this forced the Scottish Criminal Justice Service to take shape become what it is today to deal with the new crime and punishment issues that were revolutionizing over time.