Our Director, Phil Bowen, reflects on the personal journey he has gone through in helping realise a long term aim of the Centre.
Almost twenty years ago, I found myself in the Brooklyn Treatment Court. I had already been thrown by the fact you could operate a court on the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper and was even more discombobulated when I saw the judge in her robes actively engaging with a young man about how his sister was doing. Was this a court or had I wandered into a support group? That question was quickly answered when the next individual, who had repeatedly failed to attend appointments and had re-offended, was breached, cuffed and sent off to jail by two big court staff (who had guns…), with the judge's disappointment ringing in my ears. The guy next to me said to his buddy in the next seat, “This judge don’t mess.”
I was in my mid-twenties and had somehow wangled a year or so working in New York City at the Center for Court Innovation, on secondment from the civil service. I had come to investigate how these ‘problem-solving’ courts worked and how they could be spread. At that stage, there were already early attempts to pilot some of these approaches in the UK but already people in the Home Office were asking how such innovation could be made good for all time zones.
Little did I know that, over the next twenty years, a substantial part of my career would become devoted to problem-solving courts and to the question of mainstreaming innovation in public services. These questions have led me to learn from Maori elders about restorative justice, to a cold winter’s day witnessing the transformative work of an Aberdeen women's centre, and to bridling about having to buy drinks for a senior judge and a Courts Minister in the Seven Stars round the back of the Royal Courts of Justice. It has led me and my team to be invited to advise successive Ministers and senior judges on the value of problem-solving courts, whether that be in the family or the criminal courts, including stints for me as a part time policy fellow to two Lord Chancellors and providing advice to a Sentencing Review. It has led us to some pretty bland training rooms across the country to work with truly exceptional practitioners and judges– professionals coming together from their different disciplines (police, treatment, probation, social work, courts and lived experience) and often re-discovering why they got into this difficult work in the first place.
So I hope it is not too self-centred for the Centre to take some pride in the latest announcement of funding for a new tranche of intensive supervision courts. In a political world in which crime and justice is a political football, problem-solving courts have been supported and accelerated by Governments of different political persuasions. To our evidence-based sensibilities, we hope this is in part because they work. But it is also in part because politicians and others can see their humanity. In a system that often shutters its mind to the messiness of human lives, the work of problem-solving court judges and teams to understand and work with the whole person in front of them and to do so in plain sight is moving.
These courts do not shy away from wrestling with big ideas about punishment, retribution, reconciliation and healing. They don’t ignore the little things either; little things like handing a certificate to someone who had never been praised by someone in authority before; little things like helping a woman with her childcare before she had to attend court; little things like asking after your sister because you are her only carer.
Of course, Government announcements are one thing; delivering system change is another. But I think we have a chance.