IN JULY Michael Gove outlined a plan for prisons in England and Wales: they would get more progressive. Education would flourish, governors would be given more control, and shining new jails would be built, displacing crumbling Victorian confections, with their “dark corners” and attendant dark deeds. A welcome aim, but also rather costly and complicated. Instead, the justice minister might look to Scotland’s prison service which, despite its hotch-potch of old and new institutions, and limited spending, has been getting quietly more progressive for years.

Scotland is more reluctant to lock up minor offenders than the rest of Britain. It does not jail people for defaulting on fines less than £500 ($765); England and Wales still put people behind bars for failing to pay fines over unpaid television licences. And whereas Scottish courts used to hand out a lot of short sentences, in recent years they have used them less; in September Scottish ministers proposed doing away with short sentences altogether. This is sensible: in England and Wales around three-fifths of those who have been in jail for less than 12 months reoffend within a year of their release.

Instead, Scots often serve their time painting walls or shovelling leaves in the community, a sentence that is reckoned to lead to lower reoffending rates than jail. In 2009-13, as the number of people sentenced to community work fell by one-fifth in England, it increased by about one-tenth in Scotland. Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, a think-tank, points out that whereas English probation is run by the prison service, Scotland’s is under the control of social workers. This demonstrates, he says, Scotland’s “more holistic” approach to criminals.

Scotland is also a lighter touch with the light-fingered young. Since 2008 the number of juveniles in Scottish jails has almost halved: an entire building at Polmont young offenders’ institution stands empty. Women are also getting softer treatment. Whereas a damning report in 2007 on the treatment of British female prisoners was largely ignored in England and Wales, Scotland seems to be following its recommendations. It is closing its large women’s prison, Cornton Vale, and will replace it with a number of smaller, more rehabilitationfocused institutions, spread around the country so that inmates can be closer to their families.

All this may explain why the Scottish system’s results have been improving faster than those of Her Majesty’s Prison Service, its English and Welsh equivalent. In 2004-13 the rate of recidivism fell by 4.1 percentage points in Scotland, compared with 0.9 percentage points in England and Wales; for juveniles it fell by 7.6 percentage points in Scotland and rose by 3.8 percentage points in England and Wales. And despite the stereotypes (“Glaswegian” being practically a synonym for “violent”, as far as many English people are concerned) Scottish prisoners seem to be getting gentler. In English and Welsh prisons serious assaults recently spiked to their highest level in ten years; in Scotland they have broadly been falling since 2004.

Scotland’s progressive policies are not the result of a sweeping Govian vision, but have gradually come about through the nudges of Scotland’s competing left-wing parties (each of which now takes full credit for them). Yet they are simple, cheap and seem to be working. The justice minister should take heed.