I NOTE that there has been a lot of concern over the past few days with regard to a 14-year-old boy being held in Perth Prison.

I do not think that society in itself could ever condone the use of adult penal establishments for the incarceration of minors, immaterial of circumstances surrounding the actual offence or how well and how securely a young person may be cared for. It is simply that adult penal establishments are designed for the incarceration of adults and certainly not for children, and in that respect I would agree with all the comments that have been made so far with regards to their being a huge gap for the service provisions of child offenders in Scotland.

It is well documented that, with the exception of Portugal, Scotland has the highest prison population of any other European country. I would contend that the principal reason for this sad state of affairs is that for a large number of offenders who are incarcerated in Scotland's prisons the sentence they have received is inappropriate to the offence committed, resulting in an over-population of Scotland's prisons and consequently an under provision of resources in the criminal justice system.

We are, however, still in a position where central government is going to spend in the region of #55m to build a private prison near Kilmarnock when, in both capital and revenue terms, these resources would be more sensibly utilised by providing alternatives to prison within the community. Schemes like community service, drug and alcohol rehabilitation (where the reason for the crime in the first place is dependency on drugs or alcohol and if the dependency had been addressed the crime would never have been committed), early intervention schemes, and supervised attendance and the like, thus dramatically reducing the prison population in Scotland.

As such, schemes that I have already detailed are much cheaper and more effective than keeping a person in prison. It costs around #500 per week to keep a person in prison.

Not only would the prison population dramatically decrease but resources would then be freed up not only to provide the appropriate services within the community, but also to provide the huge gap of provision that is at present lacking for child offenders.

If the Government were to use a little common sense and use resources in this manner, the service gap that exists at present for child offenders could then be closed, which would mean that the risk of a child being kept on remand in an adult prison would be very much diminished.

Councillor Keith Robertson,

Social Work Convener,

Perth and Kinross Council.

January 16.