As part of our Talking Justice blog series, Mike Findlay, Head of Communications and External Affairs at Victim Support Scotland reflects on how justice services in Scotland have adapted in a year unlike any other 

“You need a law degree to understand the justice system.”

I heard this quote a while back from a colleague which does, unfortunately, ring true. The justice system in Scotland is difficult to understand. Add trauma into the mix (which we know many victims of crime experience) and what chance have you got of getting to grips with the complexity of the system at a time when you need to the most?

Victim Support Scotland has for the last 35 years been working tirelessly with victims of all crime types access support and specialist knowledge. Our team of dedicated staff members and volunteers are available throughout all of Scotland and we provide support both in the courts – VSS has offices in all the Sheriff and High Courts – and within communities, combining tailored one-to-one emotional support with practical guidance around the criminal justice system.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the year 2020 has been one of our most challenging to date. From a victim’s perspective, we have heard repeated accounts of victims and families who are struggling due to delays in trials going ahead brought about by the pandemic. The emotional turmoil this has put on many of Scotland’s most vulnerable victims and witnesses cannot be underestimated.

Early this year, we saw a 400% increase in the number of safeguarding reports coming through our services, where victims and witnesses we support have talked about suicidal thoughts.

As this year’s situation has been overwhelming for many, now more than ever we need the right tools and resources available for people coming into the justice system for the first time. Community Justice Scotland’s Navigating the Scottish Justice System is a great example of this. It takes detailed and otherwise inaccessible information and breaks it down into something that’s easier to understand. By guiding people through a range of possible journeys, it helps to break down barriers to understanding criminal justice in Scotland.

With this in mind, Victim Support Scotland revamped our website www.victimsupport.scot to help make it more victim-centred. It provides up-to-date information about our services and the criminal justice system. The site includes a range of contact methods, enabling people to access local support quickly, through webchat and self-referral or agency referral forms. It is also the portal to the Victims’ Fund, which has been increasingly used during lockdown to support hundreds of victims often in financial destitution, covering costs such as emergency household goods, food vouchers and funeral costs.

We must not take for granted literacy levels of people coming into the justice system. Visual tools, such as Navigating the Scottish Justice System, are hugely beneficial. At Victim Support Scotland we have this year invested in Browse Aloud, which is assistive technology software that adds text-to-speech functionality to websites to aid those that struggle to read.

As well as easy to digest information on the justice system, it’s important that people understand the human impact of crime in Scotland, particularly when it comes to understanding crime trends and encouraging prevention. This is why Victim Support Scotland frequently publishes blog posts from people we have supported explaining the impact of crime on them.

While accessibility is key, it’s not only about making sure people understand the criminal justice system better. We must also come up with ways of improving it based on previous experience. That way, we can help put the experience of victims at the heart of justice in Scotland.

www.victimsupport.scot

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Our Talking Justice blog series brings together reflections from across our society. We are committed to changing the conversation about justice, increasing understanding and support for what will make Scotland better for all of us. To that end, we have have created a resource that maps out the Scottish justice system. This has been developed into an interactive digital tool: Navigating Scotland’s Justice System.

As part of our Talking Justice blog series, Lynne Thornhill, Community Justice Co-ordinator in Stirling, reflects on the challenges in our justice system – and how she’s actively driving improvements to make a difference at a local level.

The Justice System is undoubtedly complex.  The community justice workforce is a wide collection of organisations who provide lots of different services across Scotland. The interdependencies across the justice system are vast, but not always recognised or indeed used to best advantage. There is also much diversity amongst justice populations – adding another layer of complexity in terms of our individual and collective responses.

Despite the complexities, it is essential to hold on to the fact that amongst those wide range of services and organisations, there is clear alignment of the ultimate outcome we are all seeking to achieve: an individual has the tools and support to fulfil their potential.

Surely then, we have a collective responsibility to ensure that every point of contact counts as an opportunity towards ensuring this. We can only do that if we identify their needs, actively listen, and understand their life experiences.

Asking the right questions

The importance of a robust evidence base to inform our collective understanding cannot be underestimated.  The local Community Justice Partnership in Stirling is embarking upon an exciting new research project that will support peer-led researchers to engage with people in the justice system.

These findings will be triangulated with local data analysis, local service mapping and a community justice workforce consultation.  The success and value of this evidence gathering will depend on asking the right questions, and of course, as a Partnership, how we act on the answers.

What happens when you ask the right question

The right questions allow you to drive improvement at every opportunity.  At the end of last year, we asked the question ‘are we assured that all individuals who are entitled to support after serving a short-term sentence are aware of this?’ That simple question led to the development of a stakeholder group with wide representation from statutory services and the third sector with a role or vested interest in supporting successful transitions. A collective vision for delivery was identified and laid over the current process to identify areas of focus and next steps. The result – Stirling Transitions and Re-integration Support (STARS) – a co-ordinated multi-agency approach to supporting the needs of individuals transitioning from custody to community. So, the answer to that questions now is yes we are collectively assured and working together to continually improve the quality of that support offer.

It is so much easier to ask the right question when you feel knowledgeable and empowered to do so. Fostering that continuous improvement culture and identifying collective action as a partnership undoubtedly requires professional curiosity, candid conversations, the parking of preciousness, transparency and trust. But your reward….the innovation and change that comes from this high support, high challenge.

Are you empowered to ask the right questions? 

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Our Talking Justice blog series brings together reflections from across our society. We are committed to changing the conversation about justice, increasing understanding and support for what will make Scotland better for all of us. To that end, we have have created a resource that maps out the Scottish justice system. This has been developed into an interactive digital tool: Navigating Scotland’s Justice System.

As part of our Talking Justice blog series, James Maybee – Principal Officer (Criminal Justice), The Highland Council – discusses adaptability, resilience and David Bowie. 

Reflecting on the challenges in our justice system my first thought was about our readiness as a criminal justice system to change. This seems to me to be the first step crucial step in the process.

I found myself singing “Ch… ch… ch… Changes…”, David Bowie’s song! But that is probably more about artistic change. As synchronicity would have it, I came across two quotes that have more resonance in the context of change at this particular moment in time, faced as we are by a coronavirus which has literally upended our world in a way none of us could ever have imagined.

Jal?l ad-D?n Muhammad R?m?, or plain Rumi, a 13^th century Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic (I had to look him up) wrote

The other quote is probably more well know and was written by the late James Baldwin, a celebrated American writer and activist. He said,

In the headlong rush to reinvent the criminal justice system and avoid returning to business as usual, we would do well to consider the wise words of Rumi and James Baldwin.

That the criminal justice system is complex and multi-faceted is a given, but the map of the Scottish Justice System developed by Community Justice Scotland (CJS) is an eye-opener. Even as a seasoned justice professional, I was struck by how overwhelming it is.

If we truly wish to change the system for the better, I suggest we need to change ourselves and, by inference, our own part of the system first and foremost. We are not short of ideas – the recent Justice System Recovery paper from CJS is stuffed full of them. But are we collectively ready and willing to cede power, control and the hard-fought victories in our own respective parts of the system to focus on what might be best for the individuals entering the truly terrifying journey mapped out in Navigating the Criminal Justice System?

Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian renaissance diplomat, may have something of a mixed reputation, but he was surely right when he wrote in 1513, “It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out… than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour.”

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Our Talking Justice blog series brings together reflections from across our society. We are committed to changing the conversation about justice, increasing understanding and support for what will make Scotland better for all of us. To that end, we have have created a resource that maps out the Scottish justice system. This has been developed into an interactive digital tool: Navigating Scotland’s Justice System.

“In…an environment that holds the baby well enough, the baby is able to make personal development. The result is a continuity of existence that becomes a sense of existing, a sense of self, and eventually results in autonomy.”  D.W.Winnicott (1963)

We all begin our lives inside, joined up to a life giving mother. When we are born, all of this changes, and we suddenly find ourselves disconnected in a world we have little knowledge of, or control over. Donald Winnicott (1896 – 1971) was a psychoanalyst deeply concerned with the business of how we transition from this newborn state of dis-integration and total dependency, to one of relative integration and autonomy. What he, like many thinkers, theoreticians and clinicians after him is proposing, is that our sense of security, confidence and knowledge of self are intimately tied up with our developmental experiences. We can become joined-up again, through the consistent, containing experiences of some of our earliest relationships.

Connected to the concept of joined-upness is what Winnicott called the anti-social tendency. Something which he felt could develop in anyone for whom the developmental environment was significantly disturbed, ruptured or in some other way inadequate for the psychological needs of the individual. Anti-social, or criminal behaviour, was a cry for help he felt. Fuelled by a fundamental loss of integrity, and was an attempt to find that integrity, and with it a sense of security that was lacking or absent in the family or broader society.

Whatever the mechanism is, it is clear from a survey of recent literature on early childhood adversity that those with high levels of early life mistreatment are significantly over-represented in prison populations. Perhaps for many the journey into the criminal justice system is an attempt to become more integrated in mind. For many, prison itself can provide this integration through the psychological containment and security it provides by default, and may even lead some to unconsciously seek repeated returns to the containment and safety felt while incarcerated.

Contrast this with the configuration of services outside of the secure estate that can be so disintegrated as to feel both unmanageable and familiarly disturbing to those seeking integration…

It’s a multi-coloured swap-shop out there.

For those who have been fortunate enough to have had integrated, connected and containing experiences in their early years, then the negotiation of a fragmented and non-communicating set of care and support services may be relatively straightforward, but of course it is far less common that such an individual would ever find themselves needing to.

Joined-up services may well turn out to be more economic, more theoretically coherent, and more effective, but most importantly they may provide some of the coherency, continuity and connection needed by us all, and particularly those who so often have had an absence of it in their early lives. When working in the areas of trauma, neglect and adversity, services are always at risk of reflecting the complicated and disconnected interpersonal histories of the clients they are typically in relation to, and in doing so may even come to exacerbate the very difficulties they aim to relieve.

But by focusing on joining up this outside world, and by creating a common care and prevention service, we may help over time to develop a joined-up world inside the minds of those within the criminal justice system who have so often suffered the psychological consequences of disintegration. We may even, as Winnicott describes, come to facilitate a continuity of existence.

Dr. Adam Burley, Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Community Justice Scotland Board member

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Our Talking Justice blog series brings together reflections from across our society. We are committed to changing the conversation about justice, increasing understanding and support for what will make Scotland better for all of us. To that end, we have have created a resource that maps out the Scottish justice system. This has been developed into an interactive digital tool: Navigating Scotland’s Justice System.

As part of our Talking Justice blog series, Iain Smith, Partner at Keegan Smith Defence Lawyers, calls for a smarter justice system. 

The majority of Defence Lawyers enter the job wanting to help people, and I’m no exception to that. But, I’ll be honest with you. There’s been moments in my career where I’ve become jaded. I’ve thought everyone is “at it” and I’ve experienced flashes of resentment, especially when clients want to speak to you at 3am!

However, over the past two years or so, I’ve had something of an epiphany with my job. My first thought now isn’t processes or systems, it’s people. Yes, people (not “punters”) and what makes some people tick – or more than likely what stops them ticking.

Let me rewind. I stumbled across the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) back in 2018. I didn’t know anything about ACEs, or childhood trauma, at the time. But, the more I started to research it, the more things started to click. A client, who seemingly “enjoyed” heroin and alcohol, didn’t enjoy it at all. It was an action to suppress pain and trauma. Others are constantly angry and unable to self-regulate. They will tell you to “F*** off” when they really want you to listen and care.

Trauma does not touch every case, nor may it be relevant, but where it prevails it is the single biggest contributor to offending behaviours. I implore the judge, the practitioners providing support, the public, our communities, you –  to look upon the person as a person, not a criminal. The crime is what they have committed rather than who they are.

So with that in mind, take a second and think about, Brendon. Abused as a child, his ribs broken at 8 months old. He was alone, in and out of Care and disengaged for most his childhood. At 13, he was given heroin by his mum. Years later, upon entering the criminal justice system, he faced more adverse experiences.

After breaching his Community Payback Order, Brendon was back in court in front of the judge. Although she appeared annoyed at Brendon’s “failure” she understood his efforts to improve his life with help from Aid & Abet, the Rock Trust and other services.

Being trauma-informed is brave. It requires a leap of faith from everyone involved. The wide range of services, such as courts, police, and social work, that work across different stages of the Scottish justice system. As well as many others across health, housing, employability and education, which may interlink with the system. It’s vital we all work together in different ways and at various stages of the justice process to tackle the underlying causes of crime by offering treatment, rehabilitation, training and support. This is smart justice.

A judge asked me how many chances someone should get, my reply – as many as it takes to fix, heal and restore a person. There is room to punish, but if that is your main goal you’ll never repair or reform a broken individual.

I believe in people and I make no apologies for how naff that may sound! You can’t see what I see every day and not be moved. I see trauma and scars close up. I can give people a voice in court and I can signpost resources.

I can’t fix them, but – just like you – I can care.

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Our Talking Justice blog series brings together reflections from across our society. We are committed to changing the conversation about justice, increasing understanding and support for what will make Scotland better for all of us. To that end, we have created a resource that maps out the Scottish justice system. This has been developed into an interactive digital tool: Navigating Scotland’s Justice System.