It has become commonplace to laud Scottish penality for avoiding the excessive and iniquitous penal developments that characterised England and Wales and the United States of America from 1970. The 1970s was an aspirational age, a justifiably glorified period, when Scottish welfare values were in the ascendency. It was also a time when poverty, concerns of unrefined masculinity, violence and moral turpitude provoked deep anxieties in the governing elites. During the mid-twentieth century a progressive ‘development philosophy’ took hold in the Scottish Office, and civil servants were charged with urban and economic modernisation. Fears regarding crime and social disorder had a localised, place-specific character, therefore. While violence was a pervasive national stereotype, there was generally a distinct regional understanding that Glasgow was the epicentre of Scottish crime and violence. Expanding the prison estate so that it could meet the needs of the courts was paramount among the priorities of the Prison Division.