Isobel Lindsay, Sarah Armstrong, Reg McKay, Hazel Croall, Bill Wilson, Eric Swanepoel and two serving offenders look at crime and punishment in Scotland. Also Gary Fraser on the voluntary sector and public service privatisation, Michael Price on the Eigg experience, John Nicholson on the Convention of the Left and Tommy Kane and Kyle Mitchell on creeping water privatisation

In Henry Adam’s 2003 play ‘The People Next Door’ an elderly woman is sitting in her small flat alone thinking about the nature of fear. She thinks about the fears of her elderly friends who refuse to leave their house because they worry about their safety. She concludes that if they never see the outside world but only imagine it, no wonder they’re scared to go out. As she puts it “they run home from their sewing bee and lock their doors, waiting for a psychopath who never comes’.

And that is a pretty good summary of the first half of Scotland’s crime problem.