The Magistrate's Blog

This report, apart from the cheat's profession, is of a pretty common crime that most magistrates see a few times a year. Guidelines steer us towards fines in most cases (often the offender has little cash anyway), but a feature of recent years has been the prosecution's refusal to apply for an order to repay the money. Every court has to consider compensation in every relevant case, but a DSS (as was) prosecutor explained to me, as kindly as possible, that the Department is far better at recovering money than the clumsy courts' system. That makes sense when you think about it as virtually everyone gets some sort of benefits throughout their lives, even if it's only the state pension, so money can be recovered from that in due course.

Tonight, 2nd September, at 7.30 on ITV try not to miss the half-hour exposé (or so it is trailed) of sloppily-run community punishment projects.

Later:
I am sure that it came as no surprise to anyone in the system to hear that a number of projects are poorly managed and sloppily supervised. I have been writing on here for years about the dozens of times that governments have promised 'really tough' community punishments. On the whole it hasn't happened. There are myriad problems, starting with Probation's chronic under-funding, the legacy of its social-worker 'advise, assist, befriend' culture, the burden of health and safety and other rules that make much meaningful work out of the question, the lack of real sanctions against (mostly) disaffected young men who just want to doss about, as young men do. Offenders cannot be allowed to do work that would usually be done by paid employees, as the state has no business putting people out of work.

Louise Casey had the effrontery to sound cross about the shambles that ITV showed us: as the person who cooked up the bogus 'community payback' brand and insisted on orange jackets being worn she might have had the decency to rebrand it 'community layback'.

Quite a few of us on the bench prefer, when the choice is available, to impose a tagged curfew. It can be imposed without the delay of a report, it is a real punishment that amounts to house arrest, and it is managed by contractors that are professionally managed, so once you are tagged it is comply, or face breach proceedings.

For years the argument has been that courts will only use community service if it is properly demanding and properly enforced. Many of us suspected it was not, and we may well have been right.

If you misssed the programme you can catch it at ITV player.

The Ministry of Justice has a website called You Be The Judge that takes the reader through the decision-making processes used in court. I am very pleased to see it; my original motive in setting us this blog was to try to give people some idea of how the summary courts work. I haven't got the time or the resources to set up anything like the MoJ's effort, so it's a welcome contribution to people's understanding of courts and their work.