Criminal Justice in Scotland by Peter Duff Neil Hutton

Author:Peter Duff, Neil Hutton [Peter Duff, Neil Hutton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138612617
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

12 Community-based Disposals

Gill McIvor and Bryan Williams

Introduction

In Scotland, community based disposals are run by local authority social workers, who have been responsible for the provision of a range of statutory services to the criminal justice system since the absorption of the former probation service into the newly created generic social work departments in 1969. This remit includes the supervision of offenders subject to social work disposals imposed by the courts. Since 1991, however, the Social Work Services Group (SWSG) of the Scottish Office has re-imbursed to local authorities the full costs of providing these services: ‘100 per cent funding’. A significant practical consequence has been the creation in all but the smallest social work departments of specialist arrangements for the delivery, and in many cases management, of social work services to the criminal justice system.

The introduction of 100 per cent funding by central government formed one part of a broader strategy aimed at reducing the numbers of offenders who were imprisoned for short periods of time. In 1988 the then Scottish Secretary delivered the Kenneth Younger Memorial Lecture to the Howard League (Scotland) (Rifkind, 1989). In this address he outlined the government’s commitment to reducing the use of custody at the remand stage, for fine default and at first sentence. The majority of those imprisoned serve relatively short sentences and it was those who were not considered to pose any undue risk to the public for whom the increased use of community-based social work disposals was considered appropriate. The Scottish Secretary rejected the possibility of increasing the range of alternatives to custody available to the courts. Instead he sought to strengthen existing measures - probation and community service - by providing full central funding and requiring that they operate within a nationally agreed framework of objectives and standards. In this chapter we consider the philosophy and operation of both of these measures and of a relatively recent addition to the armoury of community-based disposals available to the courts: the supervised attendance order.

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