Read on Twitter
1. I've been doing some research on these types of courts in the last year. They do show promise and can have good results, keeping people out of prison and providing support in the community. However, if they're going to work we need to remember that... https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/sep/16/ministers-to-pilot-new-york-style-courts-in-reforms-to-sentencing
2. They can only work if adequately resourced: a problem solving approach in court is not going to work if the services for people to access when on the programme aren't there. So housing, drugs, mental health will need major investment to avoid the pilots being doomed to fail
3. The dropout rate and reconviction rate for individuals is relatively high. However, for those people who are successful the benefits are considerable - these people have complex needs, high levels of offending so helping one person 'go straight' can have a big impact.
4. Even for people who aren't successful in the traditional sense (no reconviction) the model can lead to reduced drug use, less serious offending which may well have an impact later on in someone's life - success/failure measures need to reflect the complexity of peoples' lives
5. If they are a solution to some of the problems in the CJS they are long-term solution: results will not be seen overnight. They need to be understood and resourced properly to avoid them being gimicks which actually just mask these wider more systemic issues.
6. They rely on good communication and partnership working within/between a range of services.
7. The projects we looked at relied heavily on supporting people and on increasing the threat of imprisonment by using GPS tags and heavy surveillance - not convinced that this was all that effective. There needs to be a good balance between care/contol.
8. It is good to see that the courts are being piloted - I'd like to see careful, high quality evaluations which do not rely on simplistic measures of 'success', that consider the structural contexts in which the courts operate and take service users' views into account.
9. Finally - I meant to add this in to the first tweet but pressed tweet by accident - I did this research with @Dr_Anna_Kawalek and @AM_Greenslade so can't take all the credit for these conclusion!
10. PS - report being published in the next day or so.
