IMAGINE a country where the number of reported rapes has soared by nearly a third in a year — but the justice minister thinks locking people up is ‘puerile’.
Teenage criminals including killers are to be spared a spell behind bars in favour of ‘care-based alternatives’, and will be treated as young offenders until the age of 25 because of their supposedly immature brains.
Offenders jailed for less than four years could be freed automatically after serving just a third of their sentences — liberating them from prisons awash with drugs.
Some 30,000 crimes in the past three years were committed by people who were on bail — 30 of them were homicides — while a dysfunctional justice quango says sex offenders can’t be called ‘high-risk’ because it’s disrespectful.
It sounds dystopian but in fact it’s a snapshot of Scotland after 15 years of unrelenting soft touch justice from the SNP.