LIES, damned lies, and statistics. Well, maybe. But there are some statistics we ought to know. Some statistics we should try to understand, particularly when they’re at odds with our own social experiences, or impressions, or prejudices.

So here’s a few for you. Since the turn of the millennium, the Scottish prison population has increased by 27%. In the year 2000, if you inspected the rosters of Her Majesty’s prisons in this jurisdiction, you’d find an average of 5868 people in custody on any given day that year. As of 2017/18? This figure stands at 7464 people. The current numbers represent a modest drop from peak incarceration. In 2011/12, an average of 8179 souls were locked up in Scottish jails at any one time.

But this figure doesn’t tell the whole story. Under the surface, the number of women facing custodial penalties in Scotland has skyrocketed in the past 20 years. Men constitute the overwhelming majority of inmates in Scotland’s penal institutions, some 95% of prisoners last year, but the number of women facing jail terms has been on the rise.

In 2000/01, an average of 207 women were in the custody of the state, either pending trial, pending sentencing or serving out the tariff the court handed down. By 2017/18, this figure had leapt to an average of 370 women, having passed through its peak – also in 2011/12 – of an average of 469 women a day living out their lives on remand or serving sentences in Cornton Vale.

This represented an eye-watering 127% increase in the number of women incarcerated in Scotland in just over a decade of devolved government. These figures can’t be explained away by changes to the general population. In 2000, just a shade over 5,000,000 lived here. Today, that figure stands at 5,425,000.

Look back even further down the timeline and you’ll find the Scottish prison population has almost doubled in size since the 1990s. We’re not alone in this respect. In England and Wales, the picture is even starker. During the same period, the population in English jails quadrupled from around 20,900 to just under 83,500 prisoners today. This is the equivalent of jailing the whole population of Scunthorpe.

But this story isn’t replicated across the world. Contrast Scotland with other European countries of similar population size and you get a very different story. In Denmark, for example, the prison population hovers around 3600. Norway? Over 3000. The Republic of Ireland? Under 4000. But Scotland? Scotland’s average prison population is almost – or more than – double all these near comparators.

Are Scots inherently more larcenous, violent and pished than they were 30 years ago? Are the people of England and Wales, today, more given to lies and brutality than their parents and grandparents were? Or is the hike in prison numbers, effectively, a political choice?

These kinds of increases are also testing for the crumbling Victorian infrastructure of Scotland’s prison estate. As the Howard League for Penal Reform pointed out, as of Christmas last year, nine out of Scotland’s 15 prisons were either at – or over – capacity. In April of this year, Her Majesty’s Prison at Barlinnie was operating at 142% of its notional capacity. Single cells, doubling up. Limited resources for rehabilitation and mental health services, particularly for prisoners who are just “passing through” on short sentences of a month or so. Implications for maintaining discipline and control.

The Scottish Government is to be commended for saying “enough is enough”, and the Greens, LibDems and Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament are to be applauded for supporting them. It is often snarled, dismissively, by its critics that Holyrood does nothing brave, nothing radical. Not this week. In one of their last acts before the summer recess, MSPs came together to pass an order which promises to shake up this picture.

Since 2010, a presumption against short periods of imprisonment has been written into Scots law. The new order will replace this with a presumption against prison terms of less than 12 months being handed down by sheriffs.

“While accounting for 12% of the prison population on any given day,” the government reasons, “short-term prisoners sentenced to 12 months or less represent around 79% of all custodial sentences, contributing to a high ‘churn’ of people passing through the prison system.”

Explaining the reform this week, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf commented: “We know from evidence and research that community-based interventions are more effective than disruptive short prison sentences. With such a high proportion of women prisoners serving custodial sentences of 12 months or less, this extension could have a significant impact on women in the justice system.”

This may be the case, but as political answers go, it’s engineered by the same firm who put up the Trojan horse. It may be more palatable to the public to try to sell a presumption against short-term prison sentences on the basis that fewer women will be unnecessarily incarcerated.

There is, after all, a strong empirical basis for thinking this policy will have a disproportionate impact on the number of women jailed in this country. Scottish Government figures suggest that “around 90%” of custodial sentences imposed on women are periods of less than 12 months. But the quantifiable reality is that men make up the overwhelming majority – 95% – of people detained in Scotland’s prisons. The proposal may have passed in Holyrood this week, but if it is to advocated for, defended and justified to the wider public, the Justice Secretary will have to wrestle with this reality.

It is only a matter of time until he is confronted in the Holyrood chamber with stories of people who will receive community penalties for wrongdoing. The latest Scottish Crime and Justice survey shows that three quarters of Scots “said they did not know very much or anything at all about the criminal justice system”. In explaining this policy, the Scottish Government cannot allow Daily Mail editorials to fill that gap in public perceptions.

Professor Cyrus Tata of the University of Strathclyde puts the central point clearly. “Many people end up in prison not because their offending demands imprisonment,” he says, but “because there does not appear to be anywhere else that can address their chronic physical, mental health, addiction, homelessness and other personal and social needs.”

As Tata observes, this last-resort thinking risks becoming self-perpetuating. Resources are “sucked into the seemingly credible, robust and reliable option of imprisonment at the expense of community-based programmes.”

And that’s the critical point. In much of our political debate, we still seem prepared to treat prison as the only form of punishment, the utility of which can be taken for granted. Community sentences all too easily attract scepticism and the legend of being “soft touch” in our tabloid media culture, which, at the same time, gives prison a free pass when it comes to assessing whether or not it represents a “credible, robust and reliable” option to address offending.

As the Prisons Commission reflected more than a decade ago, “in effect, we are expending on a prison system where offenders do life by instalments, and communities suffer from punishments that can offer no rehabilitation. While imprisonment will provide respite to a community for a short time, it can do very little to break the cycle of offending behaviour.”

The Commission concluded that “high prison populations do not reduce crime; they are more likely to create pressures that drive reoffending than to reduce it”. The Scottish Government need to hammer that argument. It isn’t tough on crime to waste hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of public money on punitive measures which will not reduce crime in the future. It isn’t tough on crime to demand ineffective prison sentences. The Cabinet Secretary must have the courage to explain this, frankly, to the Scottish people.