Kate Nevens was laughed out of the room for suggesting Scotland abolish prisons. But before we all clutch the keys to the cells, it’s worth asking whether a pokey‑free future was really so mad after all, says Kevin McKenna.

A young Scottish Greens candidate has been mocked for seeking to abolish prisons. But who knows what might have happened if Scotland had adopted it.

I can't be alone in harbouring a measure of sympathy for Kate Nevens, the Scottish Greens candidate for Lothians East. Ms Nevens had made an admirable attempt to inject some zip into a rather pallid Holyrood election by campaigning to abolish prisons in Scotland.

It was an eye-catching and bold policy which - at a stroke - would have solved one of the country's most intractable problems: our chronically over-crowded prisons. Sadly, it was to be close, but no cigar for the brave election hopeful.

Ms Nevens was firmly told to zip it by Ross Greer, the Scottish Greens co-convenor who mouthed some pious epithets to the effect that there will always be some very violent people who need locked up. His party has previously expressed a preference for hosting some of these people in the women's prison estate.

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If sanctimony were to materialise and take human form it would look something like Mr Greer. He is George MacDonald Fraser’s Young Flashman to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.

Ms Nevens has been roundly ridiculed for suggesting a pokey-free Scotland, yet, there are precedents. In 1381, when Wat Tyler led the Peasants Revolt in England, he thought they'd secured agreement from the young King Richard II to grant an amnesty for all prisoners, including, presumably, those who'd just decapitated the Archbishop of Canterbury and paraded his head around the local neighbourhood. Richard, like his Plantagenet siblings, was really just a thug in ermine and passed up the opportunity to halt England’s cycle of medieval violence.

And besides: countries such as the Netherlands have such low incarceration rates that prisons have become almost incidental. That's what can happen when the punters are free to get aff their heids on the electric smarties and when your national team adopts a carefree 3-5-2 approach to playing football. It calms everyone down.

The Vatican too manages to keep potential psychopaths out of the jail by sending them to train as exorcists: the better for giving the Earl of Hell a dose of his own medicine by chibbing demons.

And in Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, a Clockwork Orange, the violent young anti-hero, Alex is successfully re-integrated into society by an enlightened course of aversion therapy. So, let’s not all rush to mock Ms Nevens’ proposal. 

With a bit of imagination and a sound, civic infrastructure based on enlightened models of rehabilitation, Ms Nevens’ radical approach of not throwing away the key, but instead handing it over, I think Scotland – sans pokey - could have worked.

I’d have started with something based on the Draft System they use in the American National Football League (NFL). Thus, each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities gets a chance to choose a miscreant from a list posted in specially-convened county assizes.

After having first considered their form and the skill sets they’ve developed during their time dwelling at the His Majesty’s pleasure, they would appoint local committees of upstanding men and women to choose those deemed most able to fit in with the community without causing too much bother.

Local jails could be converted into functional accommodation blocks. And right now at Victoria Quay in Edinburgh and Pacific Quay in Glasgow, there are multi-million-pound ghost towns abandoned by work-shy civil servants.

Initially, they’d be given special ankle-tags which would emit a mild electric shock if they tried to cross county lines. These could also be triggered by ingestion of Class A substances. As the former lags gained the trust of the local communities these tags would be removed. It would reinforce Scotland’s reputation for being the most enlightened, progressive and progressively enlightened wee country on the planet.

Obviously, the first picks will be your dodgy accountants and lawyers and other non-violent offenders who are unlikely to wreck the place. The selection process continues right down to your persistent bam class and your local SNP Councillor class. But the system would at least ensure equal distribution so that no neighbourhood gets a disproportionate quotient of axe-murderers.

Certainly, there’s always the problem of what to do with the irredeemable maniac class of bams. Here though, we simply take inspiration from our recent history in Northern Ireland by reviving the British Army’s notorious Black & Tans regiment and sending them to the world’s liveliest trouble spots. Or we give them internships in some of the lobbying firms which scavenge on a per diem basis at Holyrood. This is a concept whose time has come and Scotland could lead the way.

Let’s speak frankly here: the world is going through a wee apocalyptic phase which will probably get worse before it gets better. I’d be thinking about gathering our worst offenders and selling them off as job-lots to the highest bidders in some of the world’s liveliest regions.

The Ukrainians are always on the lookout for handers in their fight with the Russians. And you’ve got Somalian pirates, Houthi rebels, Mexican narcos and America’s Central Intelligence Agency who are all competing in the same marketplace for itinerant mad-squads.

Right now, we’ve got an American President who’d pay a lot of money for a crack squadron of Scotland’s most belligerent criminals to do cannonball runs of oil and molasses through the Straits of Hormuz.

Now, I don’t know if Kate Nevens is a student of philosophy but it seems to me that her Pokey-free Scotland is rooted in the analyses of some of the great thinkers. In particular, I’m looking at Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his thesis-antithesis-synthesis concept of absolute idealism.

This was explored in the 1967 movie, the Dirty Dozen where a group of hardened death-row inmates are whipped into a lethal fighting unit by Lee Marvin and tasked with taking out a German stronghold by chucking grenades and petrol bombs at a social gathering of top Nazis and their wives.

In recent years, this approach has been evident in some of Glasgow’s gangland skirmishes.

This film is too often dismissed as an unsophisticated, shoot-em-up, war movie glorifying bloodshed. Yet, it actually explored complicated, sensitive and sensitively complicated themes of forgiveness, honour and dismantling macho stereotypes in a subtle redemption arc. Mr Marvin gave us a typically intuitive portrayal of a man caught between the Scylla of violence and the Charybdis of regret before finding inner peace mentoring his wayward charges.

“Omnis sanctus praeteritum, et omnis peccator futurum habet.” That should be modern Scotland’s motto. And hats off to Kate Nevens for giving it a go.

Kevin McKenna is Scotland's Feature Writer of the Year

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