Seanad debates

Tuesday, 25 February 2014

4:15 pm

Photo of Ivana BacikIvana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Costello, to the House. I know the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, wanted to be here and as Senator Conway mentioned, he sat through the full hearing of the justice committee on 29 January when it discussed the topic. He is otherwise engaged today but I know the Minister of State has a particular interest in the area. I welcome him to the House. I commend Senator Conway and his colleagues on putting forward this motion, and it is exciting to think that we may see on foot of this motion and the Minister's commitment to the issue the establishment of a community court on a pilot basis in Dublin city centre. The hearing of the justice committee on 29 January indicated the strong support of this concept coming from a range of stakeholders and interest groups. Senator O'Donovan has expressed his support and we will have cross-party support for it in the Chamber.

The justice committee hearing built on the 2007 report of the National Crime Council to which Senator Conway has already referred. Those who gave a presentation at the committee included the Lord Mayor of Dublin, as mentioned by Senator Conway, but also the Irish Penal Reform Trust, the Dublin City Business Association, the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development, the CityWide drugs crisis campaign, the Probation Service and a range of other stakeholders. Many of the points raised by these groups have been touched on already by speakers today but I will try to make a few key arguments.

The idea of establishing a community and the general concept is very much in keeping with the strategy recommended by the justice committee to the Government last year in our report on penal reform, for which I was rapporteur. We reported in March 2013 that prison should be a sanction of last resort and we favoured the idea of penal moderation, where we should seek as far as possible to divert those persons convicted of minor non-violent offences away from prison. In its submission to the committee on 29 January, the Irish Penal Reform Trust made a very strong argument for the concept of penal moderation and that initiatives such as the community courts can help to address our current overuse of imprisonment for minor offences and shift response to minor offending towards the underlying social causes of the behaviour. That group is very supportive of the community court model. It is very much in keeping with the approach to penal strategy and policy, of which the Minister also approves.

What does a community court involve?

As the Dublin City Business Association says, it is a case of a problem-solving approach taken by a judge in a court. The advantages for Dublin would be immense if we look at the models from elsewhere, in particular the models that have been mentioned of the Midtown Community Court in New York city which was set up in 1993 but which built on the experience of drugs courts across the United States from the 1980s onwards. There is also a well known model in the Red Hook centre in Brooklyn. Others have referred to the north Liverpool model to which I will return. The advantage of such courts is that they provide a local neighbourhood-based court system to deal generally with minor offences. They are not trial courts, they are sentencing courts. The Midtown court is one such example; it is just a sentencing court and does not deal with trials. A court in Santa Monica in California deals only with first-time offenders. Some community courts are very limited in terms of the type of offence and the type of offender with which they will deal. In some cases the courts deal with the offender on the basis that no conviction is recorded once a guilty plea has been made. Offenders are then given a form of community service which is usually combined in a hybrid sense with a therapeutic or educational programme. One often has a means of addressing the underlying causes of behaviour. That is very much part of the community court model but there are many different examples.

Senator Naughton referred to the north Liverpool community court. As she pointed out, that is due to close in March this year. She mentioned the prohibitive cost of the centre but that was a particular model and rather different to the Midtown model. The north Liverpool court was a trial court as well. It dealt with a much broader range of offences than those dealt with in the New York model and it did not just deal with guilty pleas, it also dealt with trials. To be positive about it; the business of that court will transfer to a larger court complex that is nearby and there is a commitment that a number of the good practices that were developed in the north Liverpool model will be transferred to the larger court too. It is not as if the model failed or that the cost was prohibitive because it was a community court. It was a very particular type of community court and very different to that which we would see adopted in this country.

I ask the Minister of State, Deputy Costello, to bring to the attention of the Minister, Deputy Shatter, that we have received excellent submissions in particular from the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development, ACJRD, and the Probation Service which set out the type of model that would be more likely to be successful in an Irish context. One of the points made was that we already have neighbourhood courts to a much greater degree than in the United States. Our District Courts are very much community based and they serve a much smaller jurisdiction than courts typically do in the United States, even courts dealing with minor offences. They also make the point - in particular the ACJRD - that the successful community courts in the United States, especially the Midtown court in New York, is only part of a package of measures. In 2002 in New York city an entire package of measures dealing with early intervention and crime prevention was adopted and the community court was just part of it. There would need to be a commitment to ensure the provision of a range of supports around the community court model.

The Probation Service says that costs could be minimised by using the existing District Court structures, adopting the procedures currently adopted in the District Court and by limiting the application of the new community court pilot base to, for example, those who have pleaded guilty to summary offences only. A single designated judge should be appointed. The design of the court room would be important, so that the setting is more informal than the typical District Court trial. Post-sentence there would need to be commitment to have both the application of some kind of community service under the supervision of the Probation Service but also access to therapeutic or educational sessions as in the New York model.

In Ireland we do have a number of successful models on which we could build. As Senator Conway mentioned, we have quite a number of restorative justice programmes, for example in west Dublin in Blanchardstown and also in Nenagh. The Le Chéile programme operates in Limerick. The Cornmarket project is in operation in Wexford. All of those involve multidisciplinary approaches to tackling offending and to try to reduce re-offending. We have the Childrens Court, the Drug Treatment Court and the juvenile diversion programme, which in a way is similar to what is proposed except that this would also apply to adults. It is a very exciting proposal. It is great to see the Minister agree to the establishment of a community court on a pilot basis in Dublin city centre. We will see immense benefit straight away from the establishment of such a court, particularly if it is established based on the successes of models elsewhere and if we learn from models such as the north Liverpool model, which was probably over ambitious in the scope of the offences and offenders it took on.

As the Dublin City Business Association, DCBA, has stated, in terms of tackling quality of life, antisocial behaviour and public order issues on the streets of our cities, a community court could have a real impact.

The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality is currently examining the issue of domestic violence and how we can improve our services and our legal response to domestic violence issues. Senator Zappone, Senator Conway and I will attend the committee tomorrow for a second set of hearings on the issue. One of the concerns of front-line service providers in the area of domestic violence is that there are problems with the District Court in terms of inconsistency of service. There are some pockets of good practice, where there is a joined-up approach to victims and survivors of domestic violence, but there are also problems and inconsistencies. The advantage of establishing an effective community court model would be where we see it move beyond a pilot programme. We have had too many pilot programmes in the criminal justice arena. What I would like to see is a modest but effective community court developed in Dublin city that could be rolled out across Ireland within a short space of time. That would make a real difference to our criminal justice system.

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