Phil Bowen
I am not sure of the distance between Texas and Belfast but certainly the images they conjure in the mind seem pretty different. The vast, unending plains of the Texas desert seem a world away from the lush gentle slopes surrounding Belfast. But as seen in today's Guardian keen court reform observers will have noticed that distance shrinking.
First, we had Michael Gove’s trip to see a new form of Texan justice, documented by BBC’s Panorama. It was a justice that seems to jar with our stereotypes of Texas. The judge Mr Gove met did not want offenders to wear pink jumpsuits or serve long prison sentences. Instead he used the court as a tool to address criminal behaviour, making his communities safer and giving his offenders a shot at redemption. Skip forward a couple of weeks, and I found myself in Belfast, speaking about the same style of justice at a seminar hosted by the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Justice Committee. In the engaging cut and thrust of the seminar, i talked about the role that problem solving and procedural fairness- the two principles of our Better Courts work- can play in making the justice system better.
What is it about this type of justice— “problem solving” in the jargon— that seems to be getting so much traction? And why now? There are three reasons, as far as I can tell. Firstly, there is less money to spend on justice, which is forcing us all to think differently about the role and purpose of courts and prisons. Second, crime is changing. While volume crime is down, it is also clear that the crime that remains, like rising domestic and sexual abuse, is complex for the justice system to process. Three, crime, even low-level crime, can often involve people with complex lives, and whose behaviour may continue if we don’t take the opportunity to provide a better court response.
So, what do we need to do to test new ways to make the system fairer and more problem solving? In a forthcoming publication from, we set out our view — it would include a renewed focus on creating specialist responses to complex cases, for example, in domestic abuse, by using a ‘one judge, one family’ integrated court model. We also need to unlock the power and ingenuity of the magistracy to hear more cases in the community, resolving some through community resolutions, and monitoring others on community orders in our neighbourhoods. In addition, we should also be unafraid to test out using prison more intelligently, testing out different ways of running a custodial sentence based on swift and certain doses of custody to motivate offenders to comply.
It may also mean a few less headline grabbing things— judicial training, better court case allocation, re-thinking the administration of courts and the use of better technology. But, in Belfast and in Texas, and in many places we visit and work with, the idea of making our courts better is animating discussion, experimentation and innovation. The time to build better courts is now.