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Would such people be released anyway due to the policy on release, even if they have been wrongly assessed? That is the crux of my question.

I am keen to let others in, convener. If anything jumps out at me, I will jump in again.

Sorry—I appreciate that there is a technical answer to a simple question, but the problem is that I have not heard the answer yet. I want this to be absolutely clear. There are 1,317 cases, of which 1,032 are closed and the rest are open. Is there the potential for other cases to be affected by the IT glitch?

My second question is linked to the first. If the issue goes back prior to the IT centralisation project—the cabinet secretary said in his statement that that might have brought the issue to light in the first place—surely that means that, for a number of years, the system was getting it wrong. What work is being done to identify how many other cases there might be in which risk was incorrectly identified? What do you think the scale of that might be? Are we talking about tens, hundreds or thousands of cases? How many prisoners have been released in the past 10 years? I suspect that that is a substantial number. Does the Government know how many people might have been wrongly risk assessed prior to release? I do not want to know just about current cases but about those going back 10 years.

On early release, exactly how many people have been released earlier than the current statutory automatic early release? What was the nature of their term in prison? I refer to the average length of sentence and the types of offences for which they were in prison. If, as we heard from another witness, they tended to be people serving 18 months or less, I presume that they would have been released at nine months anyway, so how much of their sentences did they serve before they were released early?

I have a final question. Will there be any improvement in transparency relating to how frequently the powers are used and the impact of those powers as they are used on a case-by-case basis, given that the powers are used in different ways in different establishments? HMIPS and other stakeholders have written to us to express concern about clarity and transparency in how and when the powers were used. If the use of such powers remains a feature, will transparency be improved, particularly for the benefit of the families of those who are in prison?

I have some fact-checking questions. First, what is the current prison population in Scotland? I know that it changes daily but what is the latest snapshot?

Also, either as a number or a percentage, what percentage of those inmates currently have Covid? We know the figures for wider society; do we know the figures for the prison population?

Sorry, convener, but I have a brief question.

Is there a better way of doing it? It sounds to me as though the process of having to apply for extensions case by case is quite laborious and time consuming for the courts. A default extension would automatically mean that cases could take longer to come to pass. If the backlog is four years away from being cleared, that is beyond the statutory maximums, even after they have been extended. Many people have given evidence that they are concerned about the nature and length of the extensions; in some cases, people are being held on remand for up to a year, which might be much longer than their sentence might have been. The extension has serious implications, and international norms are being breached. Does anyone have a view on that?

Perhaps, for the benefit of time, you could write to the committee in advance of our preparation of the stage 1 report and we can analyse the information. That would be helpful.

To go back to the previous answer on reoffending, I get the impression that there was an expectation that a cohort of the prisoners would reoffend anyway because of the length of their sentences and the fact that they had not been in prison long enough to be rehabilitated, for want of a better word. If you knew that there were such high rates of reoffending in that cohort of short-term prisoners, why were they released early, cabinet secretary?

That does not answer the question. The question was: if you knew that there was such a high rate of reoffending, why on earth was it considered sensible to release those people even earlier than automatic early release, which is already debatable, at 50 per cent of their sentence?