Justice Liverpool Style

I had very mixed feelings when I initially heard about 'Justice' the new Liverpool-based daytime drama series on BBC1, but set the video recorder anyway (remember VCR's?) It's based on the real life experimental North Liverpool Community Justice Centre set up in 2005 by Lord Falconer and the last Labour government. Supposedly the idea came from government visits to a community court in Red Hook Brooklyn. All criminal justice agencies are co-located in the one building with the court room, together with community groups and charitable bodies that might be able to assist offenders. 

Goodness knows what the public at large will make of the court room scenes as this series progresses over 50 episodes because as far as I know it is an absolutely unique situation. In real life the full time incumbent is His Honour Judge David Fletcher who sits five days a week alone, unrobed and convening as either a Youth, Magistrates or Crown Court. A further experimental innovation involves so called 'problem-solving' meetings following a guilty plea. In essence it seems to be a mechanism for the Judge to be able to tease out the information that would normally be contained in a probation pre-sentence report before passing sentence. Yet more innovation involves the ability to order progress reports during the course of community sentences and either vary or revoke them.

Strangely enough just as this BBC drama series starts, there is doubt over the future of the experiment that it's based on due to spending cuts at the Ministry of Justice. Even the last government showed no signs of replicating the idea because they said it 'cost too much'. A piece of recent research entitled 'Doing Justice Locally' by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies concludes that there seems to be insufficient data to be able to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of the centre. This seems a great shame because from what I've seen it's an experiment worth persevering with for awhile yet. It strikes me that in such a set up a pro-active probation service input could have dramatic results, but I don't see much mention of probation in the report at all.

I almost forgot the programme. Based on two episodes so far it all seems sadly too far-fetched to be believable I'm afraid. A Judge 'rolling his own', wearing a pork-pie hat, roaming around the community sticking his nose into all sorts of matters that would surely prejudice any court hearing? I don't think so, unless I hadn't noticed he's been given Investigating Magistrate powers French-style as well. It's sad really as this silly aspect of the drama will inevitably distract from the inevitable powerful story lines such as child exploitation, prostitution, drug addiction, etc, etc. I can't help feeling this should really have been a probation drama, because as we know probation can legitimately go snooping around asking questions, but we'll just have to keep waiting for that.