PRISON chiefs have been criticised for spending up to £150,000 to discover if one of their jails represents "a new cultural paradigm" in Scotland.
The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) is paying academics at Cambridge University to undertake the costly research on £150m HMP Grampian.
The exercise was last night branded a waste of money on "management gobbledygook".
The Peterhead superjail, which opened last year, is Scotland's first purpose built "community facing prison", housing male and female adult prisoners, as well as young offenders. All 550 inmates are supposed to come from the region, helping to maintain the family ties as part of their rehabilitation.
However the jail has been dogged by troubles. Shortly after it opened, inmates barricaded themselves in a communal hall in a 14-hour stand-off with warders, causing nearly £150,000 worth of damage.
After the disturbance, nearly 200 offenders were moved out of the prison, leaving it half-empty.
It also emerged in December that inmates had lodged hundreds of complaints - roughly one a day - about the jail's food, laundry and gym.
The SPS's new study on how HMP Grampian is performing will be conducted by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge.
The SPS said the study, "Measuring the Quality of Prisoner Life - HMP & YOI Grampian", "is designed to understand in what practical and demonstrable ways the prison is embracing and implementing a new cultural paradigm ... How is the asset building 'desistance' model operating in practice?"
Desistance is the technical term for criminals stopping their offending.
The £150,000 covered the initial contract plus two possible extensions.
The public spending watchdog Audit Scotland recently warned "SPS, in common with every public service delivery body, will continue to face financial pressures over the coming years".
Scottish Labour justice spokesman Hugh Henry said: "It seems bizarre that the SPS can afford to spend £150,000 on management gobbledygook. They should have thought of all this before they delivered the prison."
Scottish Tory chief whip John Lamont called the report a "ridiculous waste of funds", adding: "It's worth remembering that we constantly hear from the Scottish Government how it cannot afford to put people in prison - putting an end to this kind of nonsense might help solve that."
An SPS spokeswoman said: "The research being undertaken by Cambridge University on behalf of the Scottish Prison Service is in a field in which the university has developed a high degree of experience and specialisation over many years. The SPS will be able to draw on and benefit from this and compare its results more directly with results from elsewhere in the UK."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article