Perceptions of Summary Criminal Justice in Scotland

1 Background and introduction

Background

1.1 In July and August 2011, three deliberative research workshops were held with members of the public in Scotland: one each in Ayr, Livingston and Aberdeen. The work was carried out as part of the previously published Summary Justice Reform: Victims, Witnesses and Public Perceptions Evaluation^[2]. Although some of the main findings to emerge from the workshops were reported as part of the earlier report, this report seeks to provide a fuller and more detailed analysis of the data.

Aims of the Work

1.2 The main aims of this report are to use the data from the workshops to:

• explore people’s understanding, perceptions and expectations of the Summary Criminal Justice System in Scotland;
• present wider messages around how people view justice per se; and
• discuss what could be done to improve or maximise public confidence in the system.

1.3 In doing so, both the solicited and unsolicited views of the participants are presented.

Policy Context

1.4 One of the Scottish Government’s five strategic objectives^[3] that underpin its core purpose is to create a Safer and Stronger Scotland. Two legislative changes have been introduced in recent years which seek to contribute to achieving this objective.

1.5 In 2007, the Criminal Proceedings etc. (Reform) (Scotland) Act set out a package of changes or ‘reforms’ to summary justice in Scotland collectively known as ‘Summary Justice Reforms’ or ‘SJR’. A number of these changes were independently evaluated over a period of three years^[4], and the findings emerging from each of these evaluations were used to inform the development of the new Making Justice Work (MJW) programme^[5].

1.6 The MJW programme has a broader remit than SJR, covering both civil and criminal justice. Developed to pull together a range of current and potential reforms, the five projects focus on:

• Delivering efficient and effective court structures - to create a cost effective, proportionate court structure in which cases and appeals are heard by the right court in both civil and criminal cases, reserving the use of the highest courts for the most serious and complex cases;
• Improving procedures and case management - to improve the procedures of the justice system and to introduce active and effective management of cases, in order to minimise delays and adjournments to ensure the most cost effective use of court time;
• Widening access to justice - to develop mechanisms which will support and empower citizens to avoid or resolve informally disputes and problems wherever possible, and to ensure they have access to appropriate and proportionate advice, and to a full range of methods of dispute resolution, including courts and tribunals where necessary, and appropriate alternatives;
• Co-ordinating IT and Management Information - to provide the strategic platform for the development of IT, data management and management information to ensure all justice organisations have access to the data and information that they need, with efficient administrative processes supported by appropriate technology; and
• Establishing a Scottish Tribunals Service - to establish an efficient and effective Scottish Tribunals Service by merging the administration of devolved tribunals and through the devolution of reserved tribunals to Scotland.

1.7 The vision statement of the MJW programme is that "The Scottish justice system will be fair and accessible, cost-effective and efficient, and make proportionate use of resources. Disputes and prosecutions will be resolved quickly and secure just outcomes." The five projects within the programme together seek to address National Outcome 15, namely, to ensure that public services are high quality, continually improving, efficient and responsive to local people's needs. One of the main programme benefits will potentially be improving both the user experience and public confidence in the system.

1.8 Making Justice Work is one of four justice outcomes change programmes, the others being Reducing Re-offending; Building Safer Communities and Reassuring the Public. The latter of these is still in development and is focussing specifically on how to achieve low levels of fear, alarm and distress; and high confidence in the justice system. This report will contribute to that programme by providing insight into contemporary public views regarding confidence in the justice system.

1.9 The second piece of legislation, the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010, also contained within it a number of changes to the law. These included changes which aspired to make sentences served in the community more robust, immediate and visible through the creation of the Community Payback Order and introduce a presumption against short prison sentences of 3 months or less as well as the creation of a Scottish Sentencing Council to try to ensure greater transparency and consistency in the sentencing process. The Act also sought to help the courts and prosecutors through a number of reforms to the criminal law and court procedures - ensuring the interests of justice could be served whilst trying to protect the rights of victims and witnesses involved in the system.

1.10 A Victims and Witnesses Bill is also in early development, the central objective of which is to improve the experience of victims and witnesses within the criminal justice system. A consultation paper was issued in May 2012^[6] which identified six objectives for victims and witnesses policy and a number of key proposals for system change, the feedback from which will be used in moving the Bill forward.

Wider Research Context

1.11 Although the research presented in this report was driven largely by the Summary Justice Reform programme, the findings themselves contribute more widely to what is a relatively sparse body of evidence regarding the views of the Scottish public on justice.

1.12 Although some insight into the attitudes, views and expectations of lay members of the public with regard to the justice system in England and Wales and further afield is available, the recently published literature review The Public and the Justice System: Attitudes, Drivers and Behaviour (Wilson, 2012)^[7] showed that there has been little qualitative work with members of the public in Scotland, with a preference instead for canvassing public views as part of large scale surveys (most notably via the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey).

1.13 Wilson’s review also showed that, whilst findings from the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey provide insight into public attitudes towards the justice system and notably the police across several indicators, there has, to date, been no published analysis combining these indicators to provide an overall indicator of public perceptions of justice. The review notes an absence, in particular, of views on the courts and parts of the justice system other than the police.

1.14 In the last ten years, two prominent pieces of qualitative research have been undertaken with members of the Scottish Public in relation to Justice; Nicholson’s (2003) Summary Justice Review: Public Views on Key Issues^[8], published for the Review Committee and the Report of the Summary Justice Review Committee: Supplementary Research^[9], published in 2005. Designed to provide a pre-reform insight into public opinion on summary justice, these projects together found:

• limited previous knowledge of the infrastructure of summary justice;
• inaccurate public perceptions of summary courts and greater familiarity with Sheriff Courts than lower level courts;
• people’s top priorities for the summary justice system were offender focused: with a need for appropriate punishment, deterrence, making sure offenders were not ‘let off’ and consistency in sentencing; and
• respondents welcomed the expansion of reparation to victims or community schemes and were generally strongly in favour of a “right to reply” for victims of minor crime within the court system.

1.15 Recognising the importance of public views in shaping the future of justice, and the lack of primary qualitative research, the current research sought to fill some of the gaps in knowledge and to bring up-to-date our understanding of what people know, perceive and want of the justice system in Scotland.

Methodology

1.16 The report draws on the data from three deliberative workshops attended by members of the public who had been recruited on the street and door-to-door in the summer of 2011.

1.17 Deliberative research is a technique that is useful for exploring how people feel about issues of which they have little or no previous knowledge. It is usually conducted on a larger scale than a focus group and is characterised by gathering both uninformed and informed views on a given topic. Either at, or before, the event initial views on the subject matter are collected and are compared to those given after knowledge has been imparted. The event itself is a mixture of discussion and informing of the audience by ‘experts’. In this case, a number of Summary Justice experts were invited to attend the events, to provide information to attendees and to answer questions that arose on the night. Experts included police officers, solicitors, Procurators Fiscal and victim support workers among others.

1.18 The workshop events were structured as follows:

• Completion of a pre-event questionnaire to collect information about people’s awareness and understanding of (i) the summary criminal justice system, (ii) the reforms and (iii) attitudes towards its objectives. Questions were also asked about what people wanted from the summary criminal justice system in order to have confidence in it.
• A short presentation by the researchers to define summary criminal justice followed by mini-group discussions focussing on understanding of the system, sources of information about the system, the summary justice reform objectives and what people wanted from the system in order to have confidence in it.
• Further short presentations by the researchers and expert panellists on the nature of summary criminal justice, the case process journey, the reforms and impact of the reforms to date.
• Further mini-group discussions using plausible but hypothetical case study examples of how certain types of cases may be dealt with in the system both pre- and post-reform, as well as case studies to highlight some of the process changes that had been made. Views were sought from participants on overall perceptions of the changes, whether they were perceived to be for the better or worse, if they were considered to be fair to victims, witnesses and accused, if they would help to reduce re-offending or not and if they perceived that further changes were required.
• Completion of a post-event questionnaire which again captured information about people’s awareness and understanding of the summary criminal justice system, the reforms and attitudes towards the overarching objectives of SJR.

1.19 A total of 20 people were recruited for each group and the attrition rate was low, with 56 attendees (demographics can be found in Appendix A).

1.20 All of the workshop sessions were digitally recorded and transcribed, and these transcripts were used during analysis to extrapolate shared views expressed across and between the groups.

1.21 The analysis of this data is set out in this report.

Research Caveats

1.22 While the recruitment for the workshops sought to achieve a broad mix of demographics across a spread of geographic areas, the findings presented here cannot be considered as representative of those of the communities from which the workshop participants were drawn and instead only provide indicative insight into the local communities’ views. The make-up of the groups was broadly similar, with a mix of ages and genders in each group.

1.23 Given that the views of victims and lay witnesses were canvassed separately for the overall SJR Victims, Witnesses and Public Perceptions Evaluation, and that justice professionals and accused had also been interviewed as part of the wider evaluation programme, recent direct exposure to the justice system was controlled for when recruiting for the workshops. Firstly, only people who had not been involved in the criminal justice system in the previous five years as either a victim, witness or accused were recruited. Secondly, neither the participants, nor a member of their immediate family, who worked in the criminal justice arena (for example, as a police officer, member of court staff, solicitor, etc.) were recruited.

1.24 Previous work has also shown that people from different walks of life and locations share remarkably similar views on the underlying principles of summary justice. Therefore, the small differences in the demographic profiles of participants between areas were not considered as being a source of potential bias in the research.

1.25 It is also important to note at the outset that, whilst the report relates mainly to people’s ‘perceptions’ of summary criminal justice in Scotland, in some cases, this title may be misleading since the report also covers experiences, attitudes and understanding of different components of the system, each of which are discretely different. Whilst experiences usually relate to specific reference points, attitudes in some cases were linked to direct or vicarious experience and in other cases were not, and perceptions too were sometimes experientially informed and other times not. This is noted, where appropriate, in the report.

1.26 Further, although the design of the workshops relied on obtaining uninformed and then informed views of the system, the analysis of data here has not been structured in such a way as to compare differences in views before and after information was imparted, but simply to extract emerging themes that occurred at any stage in the workshops. This means that, in some cases, attitudes and perceptions are reported which are based on factual information and other times represent only what people ‘perceived’ the system to be or how it worked. This is made clear where it occurs in the report.

1.27 Finally, although the original remit for the research was to explore views exclusively in relation to summary justice and recent reforms, it became apparent early on in the workshops that there was considerable confusion between the tiers of justice and so, in some cases, the comments that were made should be considered as relating to ‘justice’ per se, rather than necessarily reflecting the public’s views of summary justice alone. This need not be problematic and, in some cases, provides additional insight into how the system is seen through the eyes of the public it is intended to serve.