Mr. Julius Lang:

A number of issues were raised by Deputy Finian McGrath, on all of which he was thoughtful. We should be clear that there have been evaluations. Every single community has not been independently evaluated, but there have been evaluations, including the ones to which Mr. Bowen referred, that have uniformly found cost savings, primarily through avoiding victimisation. What one is doing is spending up-front in pushing resources to the front end of the system, with the goal of reducing the level of reoffending and costs, about which we heard from Mr. Justice Reilly, at the back end of the system, whether in prison or in increased crime rates. To clarify, I would say a 10% reduction in offending was a more realistic expectation.

Fear and intimidation are fundamental to what we call community justice, of which community courts are a part, but so are community policing and other community movements. I am reminded of a different project on which I work with a health foundation, the goal of which is to promote public health approaches to law enforcement. The public health experts with whom I am put together in that context talk about how good health is not achieved in a hospital or doctor's office but in communities where people eat healthily, exercise, take preventive measures, live healthy lives and only using medical services when they need to use them when something breaks down. The same is true in the case of public safety; it does not happen in police stations or prisons but in communities where informal social controls keep them safe. When communities have a sense of crisis and these informal social controls have broken down, one of the notions of community justice is to ask what the formal justice system could do to help strengthen these informal social controls that at the end of the day keep a community safe. By involving community members in community justice, the community court model is trying to address what Deputy Finian McGrath is talking about, in a case where the fabric of the community has been torn and the informal social controls are not keeping the community safe. We do not have a lot of time and I do not want to go on, but I love that question.