Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. It isn’t.
A male prisoner, convicted of a brutal murder, is being housed in the women’s estate. An allegation of sexual assault has now been made. And still we are expected to believe this is a “managed risk”.
It is not a managed risk. It is a foreseeable outcome.
You do not need hindsight to see this. You only need honesty. Women in custody are not a neutral population. They are among the most vulnerable in society. The vast majority have experienced physical or sexual abuse. Many carry long histories of trauma.
Addiction is endemic. In Scotland, the majority proportion of women in prison have drug or alcohol problems, and many have co-occurring mental health needs. These are not abstract statistics. They describe women who have already been harmed, often repeatedly, long before they ever entered a cell.
And into that environment, the state has chosen to introduce male-bodied prisoners.
That is not safeguarding. That is exposure.
What we are witnessing is not a failure of risk assessment. It is a failure of principle.
For years, the Scottish Prison Service has insisted it can assess individuals and safely place male prisoners in the female estate. That claim was always untenable. You cannot assess away biological reality. You cannot eliminate risk through forms and panels. And you cannot guarantee safety in an environment where the consequences of getting it wrong are this grave.
And now, predictably, we are here.
The most disturbing aspect is not the allegation itself, serious as it is. It is the inevitability of the response. There will be calls for calm. Assertions that the system works. Claims that this is an isolated incident.
It is not isolated. It is structural.
When policy elevates ideology above reality, harm stops being a failure and becomes the price paid to sustain the model. We know this only too well in Scotland’s addiction system, where harm reduction has shifted from a tool into an orthodoxy, and the consequences have followed accordingly.
And here, that cost is being paid by women who have no say in where they are housed, who they are housed with, or what risks they are expected to tolerate.
No civilised system should ask women, many of whom are already survivors of male violence, to accept that risk as the price of someone else’s identity claim.
This is not about prejudice. It is about duty of care. It is about safeguarding. It is about the most basic obligation of the state to protect those it holds in custody.
Until that principle is restored, cases like this will not be shocking.
They will be inevitable.