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Four criminals escaping community service punishments every day

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Why criminals are escaping their community service.

Criminals are routinely being turned away from community service due to council staff shortages.

A combination of sickness, holidays and other issues has led to four offenders a day escaping their punishment as there is no one available to supervise them. In one case, a convicted thug was sent home on five separate occasions.

The Community Payback Orders introduced by former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to replace short jail terms were supposed to make criminals “pay back the harm they have done with the sweat of their brow”.

But critics claim the system is at breaking point as they are being relied on too heavily.

Fears have also been raised that serious criminals, including rapists and knife-wielding attackers, may be going unpunished as a result of the crisis.

Top QC John Scott, chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “The impression of many in the justice system is that local social work departments are absolutely bursting at the seams.

“I suspect it’s another symptom of a system in distress if not crisis.

“It dents the credibility of Community Payback Orders and may lead to some sheriffs being more hesitant about imposing them. That then ends up pushing up the prison population.”

The Sunday Post asked Scotland’s 32 councils to tell us how many times offenders could not carry out a CPO due to council staff shortages.

Ten said they didn’t record this information, a further 10 said it had not happened at all while one refused to provide the data due to cost.

The remaining 11 councils provided figures that show offenders were unable to undertake community service 1,445 times last year due to council staff shortages.

That was down slightly on the 1,497 occasions in 2012/13 but still far higher than the 1,051 times it happened in 2011/12.

Tory justice spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell said: “This confirms what we always feared that too many of these sentences are being passed at the expense of jail terms. There’s nothing wrong with a community sentence and it’s often the best alternative to custody in certain situations.

“But now we’re seeing courts being too dependent on them and that’s not being matched by the resources on offer to cope.

“If these individuals are being literally turned away from community service, you have to ask when they’re ever going to serve the sentence handed down.

“The SNP needs to get its priorities right and make sure that when a criminal deserves to go to jail, that’s where they end up.”

Some 30 councils also provided data on how many hours of unpaid work were carried out by offenders in the last three years. The total hours had risen from 1.41 million in 2011/12 to 1.55m in 2012/13 and 1.64m in 2013/14.

It means the amount of unpaid work councils are having to supervise has increased by 16% in three years. Over the same period only 13 councils have recruited extra supervisors.

Two said staff numbers had fallen while the remaining 17 said they’d stayed the same.

The situation has been blasted by Sheriff James Spy who sits in Paisley Sheriff Court. He hit out after a solicitor representing convicted thug John Cooley, 31, said his client had been turned away from a CPO five times due to council staff shortages.

A spokesman pressure group the Taxpayers’ Alliance said: “Councils need to ensure they’ve got staff on-site to ensure sentences are carried out properly.”

A spokesman for Cosla, the umbrella body for councils, said: “Councils have no control over the number of Community Payback Orders served and have to work with the money the Scottish Government provides to fulfil whatever comes their way.

“That said, Scotland’s councils are committed to unpaid work sentences and Cosla sees unpaid work such as CPOs as key to our efforts to reduce re-offending.”

A spokesperson for the Scottish Government said: “For 2014 -15, we have protected the overall community justice budget, including funding for community sentences. This includes flexibility for them to allocate funding on the basis of local needs.

“We are also working with community justice authorities and local authorities to better determine the cost of delivering community justice services and this will help inform future funding arrangements.”