Montana Journalism Abroad

The death of Katie Allan behind bars in Scotland propels her mom and others to push for and achieve national changes for incarcerated youth

POLMONT, U.K.—At the end of a winding residential road in a commuter town between Edinburgh and Glasgow lies His Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution Polmont, the largest prison of its kind in Scotland. Written across the brick entrance is the prison’s guiding principle:  “Unlocking Potential – Transforming Lives.” 

This facility primarily houses young men between the ages of 18 and 21 that are serving time before their trials or who’ve been assigned both short-term and long-term sentences. Female offenders above the age of 21 are sometimes housed here, too.

What happened to one young woman inside what’s commonly called Polmont YOI has made Scottish headlines over the years. Katie Allan died by suicide here in 2018. Shortly after her death, a 16-year-old boy, William Lindsay, took his own life after being behind the prison’s brick walls for less than three days.

A joint sheriff’s report about their deaths pointed to weaknesses in the prison system’s treatment of the mental health of incarcerated youth in Scotland. Today, the Scottish Prison Service functions differently in the way it approaches suicide and sentences minors. Some of the changes and proposed reforms tie directly back to one woman who’s been fighting for them since her daughter’s death: Linda Allan.

Linda was working as a registered nurse for adults with disabilities when her daughter died. She’d worked under the National Healthcare Service of Scotland for about 40 years. That meant she was familiar with long wait times, which are common in the country’s universal, government-run healthcare system. 

But waiting on the criminal justice system for more information about Katie’s death and her time in Polmont YOI stretched into years, not months. Typically, a fatal accident inquiry, or FAI, is a mandatory form used to explain the causes of deaths that occur in legal custody or from workplace accidents. They’re used to determine whether or not the death was preventable. The Allan family waited six years to see theirs. They finally received the official form in January of 2025.

The nursing position Linda held came with conferred honorary status at the University of Glasgow. This allowed her to be a lecturer at the university, where she was pursuing research on health inequalities and deaths among adults with intellectual disabilities. While her family waited for answers, Linda decided to shift her focus and launch research into deaths in custody.

Following her initial research, she partnered with professor Sarah Armstrong at the University of Glasgow. Their research led to nationally recognized advocacy and an annual report for all deaths in Scottish custody, resulting in one of the most robust data-sets available on the topic. Linda moved up the ladder while bringing in more research and grant money, until she became an honorary professor in 2018.

She said that doing this work has given her a way to work through her grief. 

“There’s a part of a parent losing a child where you’ll never accept them being gone,” Linda said, sipping her latte on a cafe terrace in Glasgow.  

She describes Katie as being feisty when she was young and extremely close with her brother, Scott. She had a huge heart for social justice and was filled with nothing but remorse for her offense. 

Katie was 20 years old in 2017 when she hit and injured a runner with her Ford Fiesta and left the accident. She had reportedly been drinking. 

At the time, she was studying geography at Glasgow University in her hometown. She was three months into a 16-month sentence at Polmont YOI when she hanged herself from a door stop in her cell. Her mom and brother had visited her the day before it happened. They recall her being petrified of the situation she was in. She talked to them about her extreme distress, but asked them not to say anything to the guards. 

Linda tried to warn the guards, but she felt like they weren’t listening and needed to do more for her daughter. The FAI later noted that Linda’s report of her behavior was not properly recorded.  

“Katie was an unusual situation,” Linda said. “She made a stupid mistake with horrendous consequences.”

The prison has changed in recent years, partly due to Linda’s push for answers. 

Typically, minors that are in trouble with the legal system are placed in secure care centers, not young offender institutions. After committing a crime, minors can go through the children’s hearing system, which is focused on children’s welfare and protection, or the criminal justice system, which comes into play when they’ve been charged with a serious offense. 

According to the Youth Legal Justice Centre, local authorities can decide to place a minor in secure care if they are likely to escape other accommodations or if they pose a risk of injuring themselves or others. 

Secure care centers differ from young offender institutions by offering treatment and support to vulnerable youth rather than punishment akin to adult crimes. Rather than entering the prison system, minors can receive residential, restrictive care. 

However, if secure care centers are full, minors can be transferred to young offender institutions. 

This was the case for William Lindsay, the 16-year-old boy sent to Polmont YOI after walking into a police station wielding a knife. He hanged himself less than three days after his arrival. 

The two deaths happened within four months of each other. A shared Fatal Accident Inquiry by the Falkirk Sheriff Court investigated the incidents. In both cases, Sheriff Simon Collins, who led and released the FAI, found the deaths to be preventable.

In Katie’s case, he documented multiple prison staff failures to properly identify, record and share information related to her risk potential. For example, her history of self harm was not recorded during her mental health evaluation and a risk assessment completed by her former prison, Cornton Vale, was lost upon her arrival to Polmont. 

In Lindsay’s case, Collins found that the death was a combination of individual and collective failures by the staff at Polmont YOI. William was on observation in compliance with the prison’s suicide prevention strategy, but was taken off right before his death. 

Sheriff Collins also wrote that “almost all of those who interacted with him were at fault to some extent.”

Collins’ joint FAI noted that both offenders were high risk for suicide right before their deaths and that their rooms should’ve been altered to accommodate that. Instead, they were placed into rooms with easy ligature points: a high door stop and a bunk bed.

Linda’s original goal was to compile findings on the ways the prison system had fallen short in preventing her daughter’s death before they received their FAI. She moved to a wider campaign for prison reform when she uncovered years of injustices against incarcerated youth.

Linda’s a part of the multi-university collaboration known as the Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research. In its annual report, “Nothing to See Here?,” researchers found that four people die in Scottish prisons every week, amounting to more than 240 prisoner deaths every year. This includes people who are in prison, in police custody, who are detained for mental health reasons, or who are children in secure settings. With each, an FAI is required. However, according to the report, the average time for an FAI to be completed was 735 days, or two years.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Linda Allan said about the findings. “We were just putting on paper what we already knew. You’re looking at young people that have been failed from birth by the state.”

Her involvement in this research is a huge part of her life now. Linda said that’s because she wants the general public to be more informed about what is happening behind the prison gates. 

“Criminal justice isn’t something you know about unless it touches your life,” she said. 

Her son, Scott, was 15 when his sister died. He found himself dealing with complicated grief and poor mental health. Scott Allan attributes private therapy as being the reason he and his parents are still alive today. 

His experience has been so positive that he decided to study psychology at the University of Glasgow-Caledonia. Inspired by his sister’s case, Scott said his ultimate goal is to become a therapist working on the correlation between crime and the adverse psychological experiences of those who commit them.

It was jarring to realize just how little the general public knows about the reality of mental health and suicide and how ill-prepared even trained professors were to talk about it.

“In the school system, there’s a script for, ‘Here’s the names for mental health,’ and that’s all,” he said. “There’s a lack of awareness. The teachers didn’t know what to do with it, because they weren’t informed.” 

Linda believes her family’s clean background and class status helped push the narrative for the changes needed. Katie’s death and the fallout have been well-covered in the U.K.

“I think what made us perhaps a wee bit different from other families was our demographic. We come from a middle-class family. My husband and I have worked all our lives. There were no problems of addiction in the family. It wasn’t just the financial resources that we had,” she said.

Dani Garavelli is a freelance journalist who’s written for a variety of papers across Scotland and the U.K., including the Herald, the Guardian and, more recently, the London Review of Books. She frequently covers social justice issues, including deaths in custody. 

Garavelli first wrote about Polmont YOI in 2016 when the prison implemented “Talk To Me,” the suicide prevention strategy in place when Katie Allan and William Lindsay died. She recalls writing positively about the promise of the new approach. Then, the suicides happened.

“It was a good idea, but bad implementation,” Garavelli said in an interview in Glasgow. “You need more than a strategy to make change.”

When she learned the details of the ongoing investigation and Linda’s campaign, she said she fell into a six-year rabbit hole of reporting. She wanted to help the two families and create a clear record of the legal progress between two separate but intertwined cases.

In the years following Lindsay’s death, Garavelli developed a relationship with his family. She worked closely with his mother, Christine, before she died in 2021, making her one of the last people to hear the family’s story in their own words. 

Garavelli said that Lindsay came from a loving but chaotic household. She also saw firsthand how large the role of an inmate’s background plays in the legal and media representation that they receive.

One of Scotland’s largest suicide prevention charities, Samaritans, released a report, “Unlocking the Evidence: Understanding Suicide in Prisons.” It found that certain key factors increase the odds of a prisoner committing suicide before they ever set foot in a prison. Factors can include mental illness, previous self-harm attempts and coming from a disadvantaged background.

Garavelli said that was evident in Lindsay’s case. “Christine was just as determined as Linda that something had to be done, but she was without the class resources.”

Christine Lindsay and Linda Allan connected and teamed up to campaign for change. The two families worked with Garavelli to try and get their story heard. 

“Before Christine died, Linda promised her she’d keep campaigning,” Garavelli said. “Not just for Katie, but for William and the other kids as well.”

Advocates have begun to make ripples in the prison system. In 2024, the Children Care and Justice Bill passed in the Scottish Parliament. The bill redefines who qualifies as a child in the eyes of the justice system and how they should be prosecuted. All minors, or offenders under the age of 18, are also to be removed from prisons and young offender institutions under the act.

This means that if William were to commit the same offense today, he legally could not be transferred to Polmont YOI. Though this bill was monumental for the treatment of young offenders, it would not have applied in Katie’s case, being that she was sentenced at age 20.

The Allan family’s campaign is now pushing for the removal of crown immunity, which holds that those working under royal government services, including the Scottish Prison Service, cannot face criminal prosecution. In April 2025, the head of the country’s prison services told the Allan family that she agrees crown immunity should be abolished.

Garavelli believes that because prisons are untouchable, they aren’t held accountable. Her investment in both families has made her less of an objective observer and more of an advocate for reform. She agrees that the institutions themselves need to be monitored more closely and held accountable.

“If you can’t prosecute an organization for their lapses,” she said, “they’re never going to be held responsible.”

Linda and other advocates continue to lobby both the Scottish and U.K. parliaments to remove crown immunity from prisons. If they’re successful, that would be a huge milestone, she said. 

“The minute an organization knows it can be prosecuted, it will change, because they know it’ll cost them a lot of money,” she said.

While campaigning, Linda heard from Angela Constance, the cabinet secretary for Justice and Home Affairs, who is now applying pressure in support of the changes. 

Recently, Constance announced she would be leading the implementation of a Ministerial Accountability Board. The board will examine the faults of its current suicide prevention strategy and release new training for staff by 2026. It will also be reviewing the FAI system and offering legal aid to family members affected by deaths in custody. 

The board is expected to have its inaugural meeting next month with first steps to include making sure the failures in Sheriff Collins’ FAI are addressed and resolved at a reasonable pace. 

Linda said another goal concerns enforcement. She wants sheriffs to have the power to ensure their FAI recommendations are followed. 

Garavelli’s “Jailed, Failed, Forgotten,” published in the London Review of Books is a finalist for the U.K.’s top award for political writing, known as the Orwell Prize. In the piece, she noted that at least 51 young offenders have died by suicide in the last two decades. Almost all of them, 97%, were due to hanging.

It still took until March of 2025 for Polmont YOI to formally state it would remove bunk beds from prisoners’ rooms. 

“What’s the point of using an FAI if there’s no mechanism to enforce it,” Garavelli said. “It’s just a piece of paper if there’s no oversight.”

On her forearm, Linda Allan has a tattoo dedicated to her daughter. Katie’s name is featured in a twisting heart with a semicolon, a well-recognized symbol for suicide awareness. It’s nestled in the branches of a cherry blossom, Katie’s favorite flower.

The top of the piece features Gaelic lyrics, “Maindrich gaol is ceàl.” Linda’s translation is: “If love and music live, we may never die at all.”

It’s from one of Katie’s favorite songs, “Farewell,” by Skipinnish, a traditional Scottish band that she and Scott grew up listening to.

Linda remembers visiting Katie’s favorite beach in the Highlands to spread her ashes. Afterward, she and her family went out to eat at a pub they used to frequent when they traveled north. When they walked into the place that they both described as always being musicless,  “Farewell” started to play.

Linda said she knew at that moment that they had brought Katie to the right final resting place. She felt confident that the way to move forward from loss would be to keep seeking justice, because it would give other families better tools to fight the same battle.

“It’s not just about Katie anymore,” she said.

This story is part of a healthcare series produced by the International Reporting program at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Read more from this Scotland-based project, as well as reports from other countries, at Montana Journalism Abroad.