Social justice meets criminal justice

Magistrates’ working experiences, alongside the various alterations and modernising processes being implemented within the lower criminal courts, have been the focus of discussion in the previous two chapters. This chapter moves to take a slightly different direction. It returns to the theme introduced in Chapter 3 on the prevalence of social and economic marginalisation among courtroom defendants and emphasises that the lower-tier magistrates’ courts are mainly processing people whose lives and lifestyles are enmeshed within complex and tangled situations of disadvantage, who quite often have health and other treatment needs, such as drug and alcohol addiction and mental disorder, to which offending is sometimes attributed. Other criminal justice commentators highlight this as a feature of lower criminal court working, with questions relating to ‘equal justice’ asked in connection to it (Kramer, 2000; Heffernan and Kleinig, 2000; Hudson, 2000). Together with the central role that magistrates play in sentencing and dispensing penalties, and the fact that a high proportion of defendants in the lower courts have social, economic and health disadvantages, an interest in how magistrates locate crime and criminality in wider society emerged within my research. In this regard, in this chapter I am interested in the social justice elements of criminal justice (Heffernan, 2000) and how these can be theorised within the work of the lower-tier magistrates’ courts. It continues to draw on the research interviews and experiences of magistrates in their working role and examines how social justice conceptions and values are present within magistrates’ views and outlooks. It draws significantly on themes of rehabilitative sentencing, ‘sentencer supervision’ and specialist problem-solving court approaches. If we take at its most basic that social justice is the equal and fair distribution of resources, as argued by Barry (2005) and Heffernan (2000), themes of social justice can be applied to lower courtroom work and come out from the magistrates’ narratives in relation to the sentencing role they perform. At the heart of this chapter’s analysis, therefore, is the interconnectedness of social justice and criminal justice, which can be applied to the interplay of rehabilitation, sentencing and offender management as dispensed within the lower court arena. Alongside the connections that can be made to social justice, this chapter discusses the way that traditional styles of courtroom justice are being appraised

and whether the alternative dispute resolution approaches emerging in the form of specialist problem-solving courts, and taking reconciliation beyond courtroom settings into community locations have mileage for the future. ‘Specialist courts’ modelled on problem-solving approaches are becoming established in the English criminal justice system and discussions are ongoing about magistrates’ role in delivering these court models (Centre for Justice Innovation, 2015; Carlile, 2014; Ward, 2014). It emerged through the research that some magistrates are at the centre of social justice innovations that are forward-thinking in design and are uniquely based on their specialised courtroom knowledge of disadvantage among the lives of the people they encounter, such as drug and alcohol dependence, absent parenting and early independence, as well as their awareness of the gaps that exist within social welfare and health provision to help people address these life issues. One particular example was a group of youth court magistrates in one focus group, who were involved in a problem-solving court approach with young offenders (see Ward and Warkel, 2015). Another was the work of a magistrate who set up a supported hostel for young men coming out of prison with no secure accommodation to move to on release. These examples are discussed further later in this chapter, but my argument is that social justice meets criminal justice within magistrates’ court work, and more recognition and utility can be drawn from this in different ways in moving forwards in criminal court and justice reform, and with the central inclusion of suitably qualified magistrates. With this chapter contributing to theorisations of social justice and the interconnection with criminal justice, it is necessary to return to the overview of social justice as provided in the introductory chapter. Heffernan (2000) connects these two concepts and asks complex questions relating to ideals of social justice as the fair and equal distribution of resources and opportunities (Barry, 2005), or indeed the unequal distribution and the resulting poverty and economic deprivation for some people. He builds within his arguments whether we can justifiably contemplate social deprivation as a defence or excuse within the administration of law. Heffernan draws on Bazelon’s (1976) suggestion for the legitimated defence of ‘rotten social background’ in the knowledge of the dire and blameless circumstances some accused defendants live in and which link to some offending pathways. This chapter moves to engage with the magistrates’ interviews before returning to expand on my theory that the lower criminal courts can be defined as a space in which social justice is embedded within lower criminal court practice.