A Scottish Green candidate on course to become an MSP in May’s Holyrood election wants to close all the country’s prisons and replace jail time with community sentences.
Kate Nevens said she wanted to see ‘the complete abolition of the prison system in Scotland’ in an online video.
She justified the move by saying jails did not cut crime and were ‘really poor’ for prisoners’ ‘health and wellbeing’, especially for female inmates.
Ms Nevens posted the video after initially appearing to row back from her hardline position.
Over the Easter weekend, in a statement to The Times issued in her name by the party she said she backed prison as a ‘last resort’. And the Greens told the paper they did not back complete abolition.
But yesterday she posted a clip on social media from a secondary school debate she attended in the constituency of Edinburgh North Eastern and Leith, where she is being tipped to win a seat.
She wrote: ‘No past tense here, still keen to live in a Scotland with no prisons’, and in the video she told students: ‘I would want to see the complete abolition of the prison system in Scotland…
‘That is an ultimate goal for the Greens, is to not have the prison system as it is right now.’
But the Scottish Tories branded it ‘insane’, with candidate for Edinburgh South Western Sue Webber saying: ‘It beggars belief that someone who fervently believes that murderers and rapists shouldn’t be locked up is high up the Greens’ Lothian list and could become an MSP.
‘If Ross Greer and Gillian Mackay had a shred of credibility as serious politicians, they would disown this candidate now.
‘The Greens are a party of dangerous extremists and yet the SNP have already invited them into government before and John Swinney would happily stitch up a new deal with his fellow nationalists if it meant keeping himself in Bute House.’
Ms Nevens added that before that could happen the party wanted to ‘massively reduce the number of people we are sending to prison’ and make more use of ‘community justice processes’ like electronic tagging and unpaid or low-paid work.
In the social media post she also linked to the website of an organisation, Abolitionist Future, which wants ‘to build a future without prisons, police and punishment’.
Her stance was backed on social media by another Green standing in the multi-seat constituency, poet Q Manivannan.
