Modernising justice

Mr Wallace cannot claim to have made significant progress with our Justice System. If he will not take my word for it he should speak to some of the more clued up Labour backbenchers who will disabuse him of this notion. Violent crime is increasing but to claim that crime overall is falling is nonsense. Lack of action has resulted in a great apathy towards the reporting of minor crime, particularly if the offender is under the age of 16. The Justice 2 Committee must take great credit for preventing the Executive proposals to take offenders up to the age of 17 and potentially 18 before the Hearing System rather than adult Courts.  Frankly, this would have caused crime to soar.

The Criminal Justice Act, which was an opportunity lost to improve our systems and the approach to youth offending, is a classic illustration. One in three of Panel Members resign every year and it is sad that so many committed people should resign largely out of frustration that the system is impotent to deal with youthful criminality. Nobody wants to see kids locked up but we should have given the Panels wider powers to impose Community Service Orders, after school and weekend detention or grounding. These are hardly draconian measures but they would have brought home to offending youngsters that there was a consequence to their conduct. Unfortunately these measures were not taken in the Act.  

Basically the Executive’s principal aim is to keep as many people out of custody as possible.  Few would disagree with this but the alternatives to custody are so limited and so poorly administered that they simply do not bite. Inevitably the deterrent effect is reduced and more people end up in jail at the end of the day. In many instances fines are not paid and means warrants seldom executed unless the offenders find themselves arrested on another matter.  The compliance rate with Community Service Orders is low and the reporting of breaches of these Orders few and far between.  A tightening up in the administration of these Orders and the deduction of fines from salaries or benefits would toughen up the system and prevent people going to jail at the end of the day.

The innovative measures introduced such as tagging and the drugs courts do have definite possibilities but a recent visit to the Glasgow drugs court left many unanswered questions.  These courts largely deal with older offenders around 30 years of age on average with numerous convictions and custodial sentences. The cases which I saw dealt with included many who had continued to breach the terms of the order by failing to turn up for drug testing or testing positive for example.  Indeed one offender had committed a further theft five days after having been placed on the order.  This hardly fills one with confidence but I do feel that these courts might impact much more favourably if they were to deal with offenders at the lower end of the scale with few convictions and a drugs problem that they wished to address.  I very much hope that this system will work but at the moment it is seen by many as quite simply a “get out of jail free card”.  

The Criminal Justice Act could also have ended the farce of prison remission.  Originally introduced as a tool to control unruly prisoners but now automatic due to the intervention of ECHR. We should simply have amended the law to state that the sentence imposed is the sentence served. We should also help prisoners by making our jails drug free zones, allowing them to have a better chance to get free of the habit which has resulted in their imprisonment in the first place, but again the Executive could not support an amendment which would have assisted with this.  The pernicious drug culture could be controlled by a fasttrack approach to prosecutions but again a sensible amendment was not accepted.

Our Court system must be made more efficient and again the Justice 2 Committee takes credit for forcing the hand of the Executive to provide greater resources to the prosecution system but an increase in sentencing powers on Summary Complaints to 12 months imprisonment would ease the pressure on jury courts.  We really cannot regard as satisfactory a system, which takes around nine months to serve indictments in serious cases.

There is a degree of complacency on the part of the Executive on Justice issues.Too few ministers have ever actually taken a walk on the wild side or had to live in areas where criminality is rife and disorder is commonplace.

As the Parliament closed its first term the Report Card of Jim Wallace and his succession of deputies was marked “must do better”.