Social media is a place to be avoided when it’s time for a public execution. At these times, it becomes something savage, as an assortment of semi-literate grotesques gather to yell insults and throw eggs.
On Thursday, it was Natalie McGarry’s turn to face these gargoyles. The former Scottish Nationalist MP, who has an 18-month-old child, was jailed for 18 months for embezzling more than £25,000 from pro-independence campaign groups during and after the 2014 independence referendum. She is a first-time offender.
During the trial, it was revealed that McGarry had fallen into serious debt and appropriated some of the money to fund a foreign holiday for her and her husband. This was fraud and deception at an egregious level, which left many of her former friends and colleagues at the Women for Independence group feeling heartbroken and betrayed. McGarry needed to face justice for her actions and the rest of us needed to see that it was proportionate and applied compassionately. What the sheriff Paul Crozier handed down is open to question on these requirements, but it fitted the pattern of how this country assesses guilt and measures crime.
Some of us who encountered McGarry during the tumult of the independence campaign found a likable and gregarious woman, but one who didn’t perhaps possess the tenacity for professional politics. This is a calling that seeks to flay its adherents until they are left with none of their emotional safeguards. During her trial, she sacked her counsel on several occasions and attempted in vain to reverse her guilty plea. The respected journalist and court reporter James Doleman, who covered the proceedings, wrote: “Watching Natalie McGarry leave court today, nobody I saw expressed any righteous anger, just sadness at a life gone so terribly wrong.”
McGarry’s mental fragility and what the prospect of being separated from her child might do to both of them seemed to cut no ice. This is modern, enlightened, progressive Scotland, where all roads lead to jail even when there is no danger to the public. In the course of a thousand years, it seems we haven’t progressed beyond an atavistic and savage tendency to lock people up. But, hey, at least we no longer hang people. Instead, the taxpayer will pay at least £30,000 to keep McGarry in prison. This is the price we pay for refusing to consider something more refined such as unpaid work and financial compensation, perhaps with a restriction of liberty sanction.
Fergus McNeill, professor of criminology and social work at the University of Glasgow, said he had deep misgivings about the sentence but also a degree of sympathy for the sheriff, who in this case perhaps felt restricted in his options by McGarry’s apparent reluctance to take responsibility for her actions or show remorse.
“What this case highlights,” he said, “is a system that can’t cope with the disordered reality of the lives of many women who enter it. For many, chronic social, personal and health-related problems impede the production of the remorseful, compliant, docile subject that the law and the court wants to see before it will extend leniency. So it treats chaos and disorder as danger and defiance, which is why so many women end up in prison not because of what they’ve done, but because they can’t play the part the system needs them to play.”
McNeill’s observations echo concerns raised in the 2012 Angiolini commission on women offenders after Scottish government concerns about the high number of women we insist on sending to jail. The numbers stitched into the report are depressing: in 2010/11, under 2% of the women guilty of a criminal offence were convicted for serious violence; 75% of custodial sentences imposed on women are for six months or less; at 5%, the percentage of women in the 2010/2011 Scottish prison population was greater than 10 years earlier (3.5%).
In addition, the imprisonment of women in Scotland increased at a greater rate than men and, in 2007, 80% of women in Cornton Vale jail were reported to have mental health difficulties. Women were also 10 times more likely to self-harm than male prisoners and 35% indicated they had committed the offence to gain money for drugs (compared with 16% of male prisoners). Other numbers suggested the inevitable consequences of patterns of multi-deprivation and found links to female offending and severe physical and sexual abuse.
Astonishingly, the Scottish government’s response was to announce the building of another women’s prison, although it cancelled the plan after public outrage and a campaign by Women for Independence. The government’s subsequent plans for a small, secure prison and a number of community units are proceeding at a glacial pace.
Governments can be forced to change attitudes and the judiciary can be altered, over time, to reflect more authentically the tides that ebb and flow beneath real lives and beyond the anointed existences of their lordships. However, what seems harder to change is the mob rule of social media.
What moves people to shout their glee on social media at the downfall of another human being? I hope that if they or their loved ones ever take a wrong turning in life through simple human frailty they are met with more compassion and humanity than many are willing to extend to Natalie McGarry.
• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist
