As one who successfully combines the dress sense of Liberace with the wardrobe of Rosa Klebb, I am intrigued to see the debate about the increased use of community sentencing — as advocated last week by the Scottish Prison Commission — polarising around the vital topic of what offenders should wear. Those advocating fluorescent bibs to make offenders more visible have been taken to task by those who believe such garb to be a humiliation too far. Uniform is fine for police, traffic wardens, airline staff and school children, but is a potential breach of the criminal’s human rights — human rights having usurped human wrongs as the primary concern of the penal system.

The commission, led by the former first minister Henry McLeish, has spent nine months examining the country’s penal system and has outlined 23 recommendations which would reduce Scotland’s overcrowded prison population by a third. Chief among the recommendations is a move to scrap all prison sentences of less than six months. In most instances these would be replaced by community sentences.

Community sentencing has, in theory, much to recommend it. The notion of offenders paying back the community they have damaged is a noble one. Hard graft deftly combines the concepts of punishment and rehabilitation. Those who complete a project can take pride in their work.

Whereas prison is a destructive, costly form of punishment, community sentencing, at its best, is constructive and cost-effective. The recidivism rate for those serving a community sentence is considered to be lower than for those serving a jail sentence.

So why are community sentences not imposed more often? The answer is that they are. The prison population may have mushroomed, but more community sentences have also been handed out as the courts struggle to cope with the flood of cases. Yet despite the obvious cost savings, the public still regards non-custodial sentences as a “soft option”. This is because they often are. A damning report from the National Audit Office earlier this year found one in 10 offenders on community service orders skipped punishment simply by claiming they had overslept or got the date wrong — a fiddle, not a muddle. Those who claimed they were ill were not required to produce a doctor’s note. More than half were on waiting lists six weeks before starting their punishment. A third of community sentences were not completed and the NAO found evidence that they reduce recidivism to be weak.

McLeish’s response is to suggest that community sentences are made tougher. But a system which allows criminals to evade punishment handed down by the courts doesn’t need toughening, it needs abolishing. McLeish’s recommendations would cut the options for sheriffs and effectively force them to hand out community sentences to 81% of the prison population. They would remove control of sentencing from an independent judiciary and place it in the hands of a two new quangos, The National Sentencing Council and The Community Justice Council, thus undermining a vital component of our democracy.

It’s not as if the judiciary is considered overly punitive at present. When was the last time you heard a victim or a police officer condemn a sentence for being too tough? But the biggest drawback of the McLeish report is that it attacks the problem from the wrong end. Its stated aim is to reduce the number of prisoners to an average population of 5,000, from a current 8,000. But rather than fiddling with numbers, we should be concentrating on individuals.

Much is made of the fact that Scotland locks up many more prisoners than our Scandinavian neighbours but Scotland has the highest level of drug addiction in Europe. Only 2% of adults are addicted to heroin but drug addicts are responsible for 70% of all crime in Glasgow.

It is highly likely that if other countries experienced our drug and alcohol problems, their prison populations would explode too. The vast majority of those in Scottish prisons are repeat offenders, many of whom have been through the community sentencing programme with the regularity of rain in Airdrie.

The reason we are locking up more criminals is because they are committing more crime more often. The problem is not one of numbers but of a systemic failure to tackle the huge amount of crime committed by a relatively small group of hardened, repeat offenders. Before releasing 14,000 prisoners a year back into their beleaguered communities, we need to consult these communities. Emptying prisons is a noble aspiration, but it cannot be done in the face of rising offending. The last thing Scotland needs is a government which is duff on crime and duff on the causes of crime.

gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.co.uk

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