Mr. Philip Bowen:

I will give the committee two examples that show the contrast between different jurisdictions. In 2006 and 2007, I was working in the Bronx community court project that the Centre for Court Innovation runs in New York. The threshold was such that people were generally facing jail sentences of between one and ten days. The mandates people were getting involved a couple of days of social service or community service, or a combination of both.

Having all the services on-site and having community service crews relatively close by, we found that it was a matter of ensuring proper compliance and getting people onto orders. The thresholds of the cases were primarily well below the New York City probation threshold. The authorities in the latter system were addressing much more serious offenders. The sort of people we were seeing were responsible for the possession of small amounts of cannabis, low-level drug dealing and the sorts of quality-of-life crimes we heard about today.

The community court in Plymouth, England, focuses primarily on low-level crime, such as street drinking. It seeks to divert people who would otherwise get conditional discharges or fines that they would never pay. Magistrates essentially said they were sick of these offenders coming straight through the courts time and again for the non-payment of fines issued a week previously. The services are primarily to refer offenders to other services. In some ways, it is like an information desk. People are lost through attrition.

In both examples, we see there can be a need for one-to-one work or group work. In both cases, it is a question of liaison with probation services but not necessarily a question of taking up probation resources, which in England and Wales are geared towards the higher end of the caseload, as they seem to be here. Therefore, I believe the point Mr. Justice Reilly made, which is absolutely right, is that if there are to be community courts in Dublin, they need to be geared to this jurisdiction and the sorts of cases that arise in the courts here. They should be geared towards addressing the way in which cases flow around the system. This requires testing and refining, which is why I endorse the idea of piloting the approach first.

A point that is coming out strongly in the research is that while the modality of the services, sorts of services on offer and extent to which they are delivered well are important, community courts' ability to reduce the level of re-offending seems to be driven primarily by offenders' perception that they are being treated fairly. I refer to the notion of procedural fairness.

That suggests the process people go through in the community courts feels fairer to them than the process they go through in regular courts and that seems to be a powerful predictor of re-offending. The reason I bring that up is that I think service delivery is incredibly important, as are the types of sentences people get and the types of services they get referred into. We should not forget that one of the things community courts have done is to create a fairer and more respectful process, to which offenders feel they can relate, and that seems to have driven reductions in re-offending.