Compromise, partnership, control: Community Justice Authorities in Scotland
| Author | Katrina Morrison,Jamie Buchan |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895818814903 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895818814903
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2020, Vol. 20(2) 226 –243
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895818814903
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Compromise, partnership,
control: Community Justice
Authorities in Scotland
Jamie Buchan
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Katrina Morrison
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Abstract
Community Justice Authorities (CJAs) were heralded on their inception as modernizing
Scotland’s community justice system and resolving longstanding tensions between central and
local government over community justice control, by encouraging partnership working and
providing oversight at a regional level. However, they were largely unsuccessful and were quietly
abolished barely a decade later. Using data from two projects, we analyse the policy ‘narrative’
of CJAs in relation to features of a changing political context – particularly the (re-)establishment
of Scotland’s national government, its shifting relationship with local government and policy
convergence and divergence with England and Wales. CJAs’ origins in local/national compromise
created constitutional flaws which constrained their operation and ultimately sealed their fate,
but they nonetheless began to develop distinct identities and contributions which have been
largely overlooked. The case of CJAs illustrates how evolving local and national political contexts
shape the development of justice institutions.
Keywords
Community Justice Authorities, community penalties, devolution, local government, partnership,
Scotland
Introduction
That criminal justice policies are artefacts of their time, reflecting their political,
social and cultural contexts (McAra, 2005), is a truism of comparative criminology and
Corresponding author:
Jamie Buchan, Edinburgh Napier University, 9 Sighthill Court, Edinburgh, EH11 4BN, UK.
Email: J.Buchan@napier.ac.uk
814903CRJ0010.1177/1748895818814903Criminology & Criminal JusticeBuchan and Morrison
research-article2018
Article
Buchan and Morrison 227
apparent to anyone who seeks to understand developments in penal affairs. Recent
Scottish community justice reforms illustrate how broader shifts in penality and govern-
ance weave with local specificities to produce an outcome unique to Scotland, but which
also illustrates how a range of dynamics unfold in one jurisdiction.
Although not part of the growing body of comparative community punishment schol-
arship (see Robinson and McNeill, 2016), this article shares with some comparative
research a concern with how the development and organization of penal institutions
reflect changing nation-state identities and state-building efforts. Particularly important
is the influence of central/local structures in the post-devolutionary landscape (Jeffery,
2006; McGarvey, 2002, 2012). We also draw on Lacey’s (2008, 2012) argument about
the role played by political (especially electoral) configurations in shaping the style of
penal policy making. The Scottish context partly reflects the reorganization of govern-
ance in an emerging state with the creation of new structures and veto points (McAra,
2008; Munro et al., 2010), processes of policy convergence and divergence (Crawford,
2009) with England and Wales and the evolution of previous administrations’ legacies in
changed political environments (Mooney et al., 2015). This context is also shaped by
long-established pre-existing institutions, including legal and criminal justice systems
(always separate from those of England and Wales) and the Westminster government
(McAra, 2008).
Here we use the Scottish Government (2014a: 1) definition of ‘community justice’ as
‘[t]he collection of agencies and services in Scotland that individually and in partnership
work to manage offenders, prevent offending and reduce reoffending and the harm that
it causes, to promote social inclusion, citizenship and desistance’. Community justice
includes Scottish criminal justice social work (CJSW), which fulfils a similar role to
probation services elsewhere (McNeill and Whyte, 2007), but also many other agencies.
Community justice shares with Community Safety and Community Planning an empha-
sis on interagency partnerships at the local level, and has partner agencies in common
with both, but it is distinguished from these by its inclusion of the agencies of supervi-
sory punishment.
The focus of this article is on two sets of reforms, leading respectively to the creation
and then the abolition of Community Justice Authorities (CJAs) – eight regional, multi-
level governance organizations charged with reducing reoffending by promoting partner-
ship and allocating funding between local government, criminal justice and other
agencies in their areas of Scotland. When they were created in 2005, CJAs were heralded
as resolving the longstanding tension between local flexibility and central control in
community justice, and were central to the then Scottish Executive’s attempts to ‘mod-
ernize’ criminal justice and finally lay to rest concerns about coordination and efficiency.
However, CJAs were made with deep constitutional flaws that prevented them fulfilling
this promise; when they were dissolved by the 2016 Community Justice (Scotland) Act,
few lamented their departure.
This article provides what we believe to be the first historical overview of these
bodies, illustrating how, in their different phases, they embody and reflect the extant
Scottish political context, and continued renegotiation over the control and ethos of
community justice in Scotland. We argue that ongoing power struggle between central
and local government resulted in compromise during CJAs’ creation, which then
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