The issue of transwomen in Scottish Prisons has caused chaos, fury and a political U-turn by the SNP in the last month over the cases of Tiffany Scott and Isla Bryson – two transwomen who were being processed as ‘women’ within the Scottish prison system.
A few voices have raised the possibility that these biological men might be gaming the system by adopting female or trans identities. The estranged wife of Bryson, Shonna Graham, dismissed her husband’s transition as a ‘sham’ and claimed Bryson was “bullsh***ing the authorities to avoid a men’s prison”.
Bryson began transitioning from male to female in 2020 – after being charged with two sex attacks.
No one has explored what the benefits of “bullsh***ing the authorities” in Scottish prisons might be. Why would any biological male go to such extreme lengths to avoid being housed in a men’s prison? Is the treatment of women in Scottish jails really so much more lenient that it might provide a felon with a ‘perverse incentive’ to change their gender identity?
When we hear that double rapist Isla Bryson was detained at Cornton Vale Women’s prison in Stirling, we assume this would involve barred and locked prison cells. But when we look into the reality of the prison system for women in Scotland we find that it has already been ‘gamed’ by progressives, creating much more attractive prisons for women, as well as shorter sentences.
A two-tier system between internment for men and women has come into existence during the last 15 years of SNP rule. It could be called a set of double standards, split down the sex divide. This is a system of ‘reform’ that affects female offenders only, and may explain why male prisoners want to identify as female. It’s because they’ll face a more comfortable stay behind bars, followed by an earlier release into the community.
This has come to light with the case of Katie Dolatowksi, a convicted serial child sex offender and self ID-ing transwoman. In 2018, Dolatowksi sexually assaulted a 10 year-old girl in a Kirkcaldy supermarket toilet and filmed a 12-year-old girl on the toilet at another supermarket. Dolatowksi violated his release terms in 2022 and, after violently assaulting an inmate at the male prison where he was being held, was moved to the all-female Cornton Vale, where inmates enjoy a degree of freedom that doesn’t exist in male prisons. It also has access to a community of female inmates.
Has the Scottish prison system created ‘perverse incentives’ for men to identity as women? How did that happen?
The Angiolini Report
It all began in 2012 after the ‘Commission for Women Offenders’ Report’ compiled by the former Lord Advocate, Dame Eilish Angiolini, claimed that Scotland’s criminal justice system needed a “radical reworking”. The Report made 37 proposals to improve the way women are treated in Scottish prisons. It called for the female-only prison at Cornton Vale to be demolished and replaced with a smaller prison and “smaller community-based units”.
Dame Eilish said: “For women who are repeatedly committing lower-level offences, we need to get better at tackling the root cause of their problems in the community, and allowing the community to benefit from the punishments imposed.”
Acting on the report, the then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill (now a member of the Alba Party) published his own report and in turn the Scottish Government’s policy became to reduce the number of women being sent to prison and to reshape the nature of internment for female offenders. These policy changes encouraged police to “issue conditional cautions and judges to impose combined custodial and community sentences”.
The focus moved to rehabilitation followed by release back into the community. Prison cells for the majority of women prisoners would be replaced by “Custodial Units for Women”.
When these plans were unveiled in 2016, Holyrood Magazine ran an article entitled: “They will not look like prisons: how community custodial units for women in Scotland will operate.”
At Cornton Vale – Scotland’s only national facility for women – five “community-based custodial units” were to be built, each able to hold up to 20 women. The then HM Prison Cornton Vale governor Rhona Hotchkiss told the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending in 2016, “These units will be in the community, they have to have minimal visible security… So they won’t have high walls, they won’t have barbed wire, they won’t have bars on the window, they will not look like prisons.”
Women will be held in “optimum security conditions for their individual needs, risks and strengths… with the majority of women in community-based custodial units serving short-term sentences”.
“Basically, what it will look like is a communal space with space for visiting experts and workers and so on, a nice visiting type area, and then the residential facilities which are as much like small flats as we can make them,” Hotchkiss said. “They’ll all be in small flatted units, they’ll all be cooking for themselves, they’ll be doing their own cleaning, their own washing, able to wander about, confined only within the perimeter of the building and only at the times that are appropriate to them.”
The slogan of the Scottish Prison Service is, un-ironically, “unlocking potential, transforming lives”.
The demolition work at the main building at Cornton Vale began in 2017, with the female prison population being rehoused in “Scotland’s first community-based custody units for women” in Glasgow and Dundee. “With the demolition of Cornton Vale under way,” then Justice Secretary Michael Matheson said, “there is no turning back on our plans for a smarter, more progressive approach to managing women in custody, ensuring they are prepared for life after release”.
The Scottish Prison Service aimed to have the new national facility at Cornton Vale and the two community units in Inverclyde and Dundee finished by the end of 2020. By 2023, the Bella Centre in Dundee was complete, offering “enhanced access to the community [and] will enable women to retain family ties while allowing supportive partnerships in the locality to flourish”. “This visionary new centre has been specifically designed to better prepare women for release and to reduce reoffending,” the brochure says.
The former Cornton Vale governor, Rhona Hotchkiss said this month that she would have refused to house transgender double-rapist Isla Bryson in her prison and described the decision as a “shambles”. But it’s clear that this was a shambles that was long in the making. It was only a matter of time before, not one but three transwomen gamed the Scottish prison system.
Foreseeable Outcomes
The more you trumpet your good intentions, the more it can backfire. In 2018, Cyrus Tata, Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Strathclyde, claimed the plans for women’s prisons “may simply make prison a more attractive place to send people”.
Canada learned from a similar liberalisation of women’s prisons project in the late 80s after it closed the country’s largest prison for women and redistributed women offenders throughout small regional facilities comparable to Scotland’s new Custodial Units.
However, the unintended consequences were dramatic. Then executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies Kim Pate, said in 2016:
It was cast as one of the best reform initiatives internationally…They were talked about as being cottage-style, community-integrated, not having fences and staffing being really about providing support and therapeutic interventions.
Unfortunately, now, 26 years on, it’s been not a dismal failure but pretty darn close and we have now more than three times the number of women in prison.
The number of female prisoners in Canada did not shrink as intended. It increased from 203 in 1988 to 676 in 2014-15.
It has been widely known in Scotland through the many news reports on the BBC since 2012 that the SNP-led Scottish Government has been declaring itself a progressive champion of female prison reform. It is also common knowledge that you serve your time with a lot more freedom in Scottish prisons if you’re a woman, that your sentence might be commuted to community service and you can have access to the outside community while you are inside. It doesn’t take genius to see how this new system provides an incentive for male prisoners to identify as female and the trouble likely to arise when you make it easier for people to self-ID, as the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill will do, reducing the time it takes to change sex from two years to a few months.
In the U.K., according to government statistics, it takes an average of 357 days for a case to reach the Crown Court, plenty of time to consider which gender you’d like to be tried under and to calculate whether you’d prefer to be interred in an all-male prison wing in a barred cell or within a newly designed Community Custodial Unit, able to walk about by yourself, to cook for yourself, and with a “nice visiting type area”.
There is growing evidence of biological men taking advantage of the changing cultural climate to game the system by self-identifying as women in other areas, not just the Scottish criminal justice system. Consider ‘Transmaxxing’, in which Incels have recently decided to ‘join the enemy’ and transition to becoming female. Admittedly, it’s a drastic measure for a young man having difficulty finding a female sexual partner, but they believe that generations of feminism have made the playing field unequal and young men are now second class citizens. Why not “become a woman”, they ask in their 73-page transmaxxing manifesto. They believe “the male gender role is broken” and that as a transitioned woman you are “less likely to get killed”, get “cheaper car insurance” and are able to “extract resources from males” and enjoy “access to female spaces”. One transmaxxer even claims swapping gender would give him a “professional advantage, priority access to mentorship programs, increased visibility and celebration of my work (even if mediocre), favourable bias during the performance review and promotion process, protection from layoffs for the sake of promoting DEI and avoiding lawsuits”.
Transmaxxers have not experienced gender dysphoria and are openly doing this to game a system they hate. They see it as a form of ironic revenge because they believe feminists gamed the system in the generations before to benefit women.
If young Incels can go to such lengths, why wouldn’t male convicts facing long, arduous and dangerous prison sentences do the same?
As former Cornton Vale Governor Rhona Hotchkiss says: “If you can get a Gender Recognition Certificate within three months, lots of male prisoners will do it.”
Jane Dough is the nom de plume of a Scottish writer.
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This is an odd article. Eg, If you can get a Gender Recognition Certificate within three months, lots of male prisoners will do it. Assuming that’s correct, prisons for men in Scotland ought to be emptying quickly, which they very likely don’t. The attempt to generalize from two repeat sex offenders, one of them additionally being a paedophile, to men as a group is too openly misandrist to be taken seriously, even before bringing up incels again removes any doubt about who’s talking here and what the agenda is.
‘lots of’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘most’ or anything near ‘most’, so over a period of time lots of male prisoners could indeed get a Gender Recognition Certificate without any prisons “emptying quickly”.
Lots is an unqualified quantifier whose meaning is opposite to few and – for most people, which is certainly absolutely intended – will mean most to almost all. It certainly at least strongly suggest that people are literally queueing to get Gender Recognition Certificates for this purpose. As stated, however, that’s just a prejudice of one Rhona Hotchkiss and that exactly two (sexually deviant) men have done this (according to the article) does not support this assertion.
On this “English Grammar Lessons” website, there is the following sentence:
“Lots of people write novels they have no intention of publishing…”
It’s very clear what that means, and it clearly doesn’t mean that most people write novels they have no intention of publishing.
If I said ‘Lots of people have been killed by the vaccines’, would you disagree because most people have not been killed by the vaccines, and correct me by saying that only a few people have been killed by the vaccines?
https://english-grammar-lessons.com/how-to-write-a-romance-novel/
“Lots of people write novels they have no intention of publishing…”
It’s very clear what that means, and it clearly doesn’t mean that most people write novels they have no intention of publishing.
Yup. Just as Lots of people in prison would want to do … doesn’t mean Most people, ie, including people who are not in prison, would want to do …
This is a seriously poor sophistical trick, by the way.
Do you agree that lots of vaccinated people have been killed by the vaccines?
If so, you have to agree that ‘lots’ doesn’t necessarily mean most, and in some cases – such as the vaccines killing people – it can mean quite a tiny proportion.
I don’t see any “sophistical trick” in that at all. ‘Lots’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘most’, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything near ‘most’.
A discussion of whether female prisoners have it easier than male prisoners is secondary to the fact that at present anyone identifying as trans is given privileged treatment. That alone would be a good reason for self-identifying as female.
Having spent decades mocking, denigrating and assaulting transgenders we as a society have moved on from ensuring they get treated with the same respect and dignity that any human being should be treated with, to venerating them and literally encouraging/pushing young children and adolescents to become trans. That in itself is a horrific development and its clearly central origin needs investigating – when all Western countries are lockstep in their methods of treating transgenders as the chosen ones, this is not an organic development, nor one that came from just copying others. It is being imposed from higher up – something like the WEF (through the UN and other corrupt international NGOs) or China, using its own experience with the devastating Cultural Revolution as a weapon to destroy a West so busy naval-gazing that it is only too happy to comply.
In any event, it strikes me as beyond self-evident that one of the primary reasons for a male criminal to wish to end up in a female prison is the fact that there are a lot of available females, paradise for hound dogs. Add to this a male predator, you are literally offering up victims to rapists on a silver platter. Beyond stupid, criminally negligent and any person in authority cooperating with letting convicted male sex offenders be incarcerated with females should be convicted of aiding and abetting.
The simple solution is that any male criminal who wishes to identify as female and be housed in a female prison must have their tackle removed first. I suspect that will separate the wheat from the chaff quite quickly.
I would like to add that my anger about the trans issue is not meant for people who are struggling or are genuinely at peace with being the opposite gender they were born and just wish to live their lives the way that makes them most happy. It is with the current movement that is in no way concerned with the happiness or mental struggles of these people, but imo has a much more nefarious goal.
“It is being imposed from higher up – something like the WEF (through the UN and other corrupt international NGOs) or China, using its own experience with the devastating Cultural Revolution as a weapon to destroy a West so busy naval-gazing that it is only too happy to comply.”
Exactly and just like all other measures: demolition of the Christian religion, blatant undermining of the institution of family and associated values, promotion of Islamism, sharia, destruction of basic institutions and services such as police and public health, the wilful attempts to break up communities – 15 minute cities, to destroy freedom of movement, the blatant wokery being forced on children and so on.
Destroy the West indeed.
It’s the result of ECHR rulings in the UK/Europe.
Whether the ECHR was acting to implement a policy agenda from the UN or elsewhere is not confirmed.
I agree with the removing tackle solution or a chemical castration of the type offered to Alan Turing. Choice would remain with convicted male to accept and go to a women’s facility or remain in male gaol.
Also, beyond self evident is the likelihood that male rapists are not the highest members of the food chain in male prisons
“Why Are Male Prisoners in Scotland Identifying as Women?”
Because wee Krankie lets them, ie because they can.
This article is about two male repeat sex offenders and not about men. There’s a political position asserting that repeat sex offender and men would be the same but this doesn’t make it so.
I’ve got an idea:
Send the male but “female” prisoners to a proper male prison but only allow them to wear full female garb once they are in there.
Sorted.
Gender identity[*] is a fictional construct and there’s no reason why the state should recognize it at all.
[*] To be precise, this is based in the assertion that people have an innate identity which is different from and more valuable than their physical existance. Put into somewhat more learned words, it’s claimed that this innate identity transcends the physical limits of the body. This makes it a supernatural quality and the supernatural is the domain of religion (or superstition). Transgenderism is thus a religion cloaked in pseudo-science. It ought to be tolerated similar to other religions but this has to work both ways: People adhering to a certain religion have no right to force others to bow to the dogmas they believe in.
Newton’s third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects. The size of the forces on the first object equals the size of the force on the second object.
He was talking about Physics, but it also applies in many other circumstances.
The bleeding-heart, not-living-in-the-real-world Progressives decide to make female prisons less punitive; more comfortable and to reduce the sentences female criminals are given.
Females who are inclined towards criminal behaviour look at the likely consequences of their behaviour and are less concerned about getting a custodial sentence.
Result: the population of female prisons increases.
The bleeding-heart, not-living-in-the-real-world Progressives decide that any man can declare he’s a woman and he automatically MUST be treated as though he is an XX female, despite the fact he retains all his male genitalia and his XY chromosomes (which can never be changed).
Males who have carried out serious criminal offences and know they are likely to be facing a prolonged spell in a secure male prison look at their options. They decide it would be far better to declare themselves to be a woman and they will automatically get a shorter sentence and that will be served in what is basically a comfortable hostel ….. with lots of potential for indulging their “natural urges” to add to the incentive.
Result: the number of criminal and violent men facing a custodial sentence who announce they’re actually a woman increases.
The bleeding-heart, not-living-in-the-real-world Progressives are astounded at the consequences of their idiocy and have to slam the brakes on.
Result (hopefully): the electorate ditches the idiots at the first opportunity they get.
Two male repeat sex offender, one of them additionally being paedophile, reportedly did that still doesn’t mean Men are doing it, all prejudices of the Scottish community of women having sex with other women notwithstanding. The mark of the bleeding heart, not living in the real world regressives is that they never understand the difference between plausibly sounding theory and reality. Hence, they remain stuck in pre-enlightenment idealism.
Example: Being out-numbered 19:1 in a closed compund by opponents armed with kitchen knives must be such an opportunity for so-called sexual predators!
I guess it also doesn’t occur to bleeding-heart, not-living-in-the-real-world progressives that female criminals in their comfortable hostel (whose other opportunities are restricted) might encourage/enjoy the natural urges of the man-in-a-frock who is also housed there.
would It be acceptable for male prisoners to be related more leniently than females?
Superb article. JKR I wonder?
People of Scotland – you get what you vote for.