Our criminal justice system isn’t listening to people, and it’s paying the price through an increasingly unreliable sense of legitimacy.
The examples trip over each other, from this excellent Police Foundation blog of a year ago about Gen Z views of policing, to the campaign to allow victims to read out their own Personal Statement in court in Northern Ireland. Even in England and Wales, where the Victim Personal Statement is supposed to be better embedded, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales wrote just two weeks ago ‘I am concerned victims are coming under undue pressure to sanitise their statements‘. Even when we do invite people’s input, we don’t really want to hear it.
It would be convenient to ascribe this to a lack of resources, but this has been a persistent problem with policing and our other criminal justice bodies, in good financial times and bad.
I’ve just completed work with (Lord) David Anderson on his ‘Lessons for Prevent’ review, commissioned by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary in the wake of the Southport attacks last summer. In the review, there is a call for ‘enhanced insight’, with a specific suggestion that young people – whose peers are now the most likely subjects of Prevent – are given methods to discuss and feed in their views about the programme and the issues facing their age group. There have in the past been a couple of attempts to do this, but they have been set aside without being replaced (see sections 4.16 and 6.43 of the review). The review also concluded that parents – of both young people and older adults – have a significant role to play in Prevent cases. Though these are usually ‘pre crime’, the opportunities to develop links with parents lie largely with the police, as well as with children’s and adult’s social care (see also 6.43).
When I left the Home Office, and before I joined SafeLives, I worked in Delhi for the charity Breakthrough India. I was astonished to see the methods and levels of engagement there with criminal justice issues. At one event I went to in a rural part of Haryana state, people arrived to take part on tractors, or on foot having walked a significant distance. They had heard about the event on community radio and wanted urgently to take part in the discussion and immersive theatre Breakthrough was facilitating. At another event schoolchildren, including hundreds of boys, talked eagerly with male activists who were open about their previous use of violence in their marriages.
This is a stark contrast, and of course heightened engagement sometimes comes from a more comprehensive lack of justice, or formal channels for feedback. However, the willingness and urgency people showed to have these conversations made me feel both ashamed and inspired.
A former colleague at SafeLives decried the move of the last few years to ‘safe spaces’, advocating instead for ‘strong spaces’, in which institutions and individuals hear something uncomfortable, can sit with it, and then truly engage with it and act on it. Everyone who participates in such a space is given agency and responsibility. It’s a nerve-wracking prospect, fraught with the kind of spontaneity we’re taught in big institutions to distrust. However, I believe it’s one which would make us all less afraid in the long run, and close the increasing gap between professionals and the public they serve.
Photo by Paul Chard on Unsplash