Reintegrative Justice in Practice

The Informal Management of Crime in an Island Community

Helen Miles, Peter Raynor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754676850
• eBook ISBN: 9781317068525
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent years have seen the development of a growing international literature on restorative justice, community justice and reintegrative alternatives to formal criminal justice processes. This literature is stronger on theory and advocacy than on detailed evaluative studies. It often relies for its practical examples on the presumed historical practices of the indigenous peoples of colonised territories, or on attempts to revive or promote modified versions of these in a modern context, which has led to debates about how far modern communities can provide a viable setting for such initiatives. This book provides a unique study of the practice of traditional reintegrative community justice in a European society: the Parish Hall Enquiry (PHE) in the Channel Island of Jersey. This is an ancient institution, based on an informal hearing and discussion of a reported offence with the alleged offender and other interested parties, carried out by centeniers (honorary police officers elected to one of Jersey's twelve parishes). It is still in regular use as an integral part of a modern criminal justice system, and it usually aims to resolve offences without recourse to formal prosecution in court. Helen Miles and Peter Raynor's research, arising from direct observation, contributes to the literature on 'what works' in resolving conflicts and influencing offenders, and their detailed case studies of how problems are addressed gives a 'hands on' flavour of the process. The authors also document the aspects of community life in Jersey that facilitate or hinder the continuation of the PHEs, drawing out the implications of these findings for wider debates about the necessary and sufficient social conditions for reintegrative justice to succeed.

Chapter 1
Introduction

For most British people, and probably for most readers of this book, the island of Jersey is both close and remote, both British and slightly foreign. It is the largest of the British Channel Islands (the others are Guernsey, Sark, Herm and Alderney) and it lies 85 miles south of England but only 14 miles from France. It measures about nine miles by five (considerably more at low tide) with 50 miles of coastline, high in the North and flatter to the South, including 20 miles of sandy beaches. The permanent population at the 2011 Census numbered 97,857 (States of Jersey 2012), supplemented every summer by substantial numbers of tourists. Situated where the English Channel blends with the Atlantic and warmed by the Gulf Stream, the Island’s climate is warmer than mainland Britain’s, and the sea, never more than a couple of miles away wherever you are on the Island, forms a constant background, varying from blue calm to wild and rocky with one of the widest tidal ranges in the world.

The attentive visitor soon notices that Jersey is more like a small self-contained country than a cut-off corner of Britain, and this impression is largely correct. Self-governing since 1204, it has never been part of, or colonised by, the United Kingdom (UK) but is a remnant of the ancient Duchy of Normandy. As a result its government and judiciary bear little resemblance to comparable institutions elsewhere in the British Isles. Until 1957 the official language was French, and much of the population spoke Jersey Norman French. However, the use of English is now almost universal with Portuguese and Polish the most common second and third languages. Despite this, many laws and some parts of court procedure remain in the French language, or more accurately an old-fashioned version of Norman French. Legislation is proposed and debated by the States, the Island’s government. Neither the European Union nor the UK government have the power to legislate for Jersey, which is a Crown Dependency, subject to the British monarch in her capacity as a successor of the Dukes of Normandy. Jersey is consequently not part of the UK, but the UK is responsible for its defence and international relations. In all other respects the Island is self-governing, and UK laws do not apply unless the Jersey government agrees that they should do so. The legislature of the Island is the ‘States of Jersey’, in which the elected and voting members are 12 Senators, 29 Deputies and 12 Connétables of the Parishes. The other members are the Bailiff, appointed by the Crown, who is also President of the Assembly; the Lieutenant-Governor, who is the Queen’s military representative; the Dean of Jersey; the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General. There are no organised political parties, and the Government consists of a Council of Ministers and (since the second ‘Clothier Report’ of 2000 which proposed a number of political reforms) several Scrutiny Panels which examine proposed policies and legislation.

Historically the economy of the islands has been based on fishing and particularly agriculture: Jersey cattle and Jersey Royal potatoes are well known. Tourism became important in the Island’s economy during the twentieth century, followed by the development of the financial services sector, which has grown to such an extent that in 2010 it accounted for 41 per cent of the economic activity on the Island and employed almost a quarter of the workforce (States of Jersey 2012). With isolated exceptions such as a temporarily significant shipbuilding industry in the days of wooden sailing ships, Jersey was never industrialised, and so has developed quite quickly from a traditional largely agricultural society to a provider of sophisticated and globalised financial services, with average incomes among the highest in Europe and a reputation as a ‘tax haven’. This has encouraged wealthy people to base themselves in Jersey (and of course their presence skews the average income figure, as well as pushing up house prices) but the lifestyle and concerns of the wealthy minority are not typical of the ordinary inhabitants of the Island, and it is largely this latter group who figure in this book.

Much of the literature about Jersey which is current on the mainland is written for the tourist, or concerns the important but relatively brief period of the German Occupation from 1940–1945, which has a continuing fascination for many British readers because Jersey and the other Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the German armed forces. This period has been covered by journalistic accounts such as that of Bunting (1995), criticised by some islanders as slightly sensationalist and uncritical about some of her sources, and recently by a substantial academic history sponsored by the Jersey Heritage Trust and the Societé Jersiaise (Sanders 2005). Certainly some characteristics of Jersey society, such as a preference for indigenous solutions to problems, a strong commitment to independence and a realistically sceptical approach to outside influences, may have been reinforced by wartime experiences. For example, the defence of the Channel Islands was abandoned by Britain at the start of hostilities, but the capital of Jersey, St. Helier, was bombed by the Germans because the British Government neglected to inform them that the Islands had been demilitarised. Later in the war, when the occupied islands were running out of food, the British Government refused to allow food to be sent in case the German garrison ate some of it.

In contrast, little has been written about the criminology of Jersey, but we have found this to be complex and interesting quite out of proportion to the small size of the Island. Jersey combines modernity and ancient tradition in unusual ways: within a few miles of the ultramodern headquarters of state-of-the-art financial enterprises the visitor can encounter a megalithic monument at which offerings of flowers are still deposited, or a breed of six-toed cats known as ‘witches’ cats’. The study of how crime is dealt with in Jersey also encounters long-standing traditions of social organisation: much of the civil administration of the Island is still based on the 12 ancient parishes, each containing a church (dedicated to the patron saint of the parish) and a Parish Hall which is the base for parish administration and plays a central role in the administration of justice. These Parish Halls have been the central focus of our research.

Crime in Jersey, as officially measured, is generally lower than on the mainland: in 2011 nearly 4,000 crimes were recorded, or 41 per thousand resident population. This was 13 per cent lower than in 2010 (States of Jersey 2012); generally the trend has been downwards since 2004. About two-thirds of all recorded crime occurs in the capital (and most populous parish) St Helier. There is particular concern about drug trafficking: many small boats and planes arrive and leave, and the very active Customs and Immigration Department seized over £2.5 million pounds’ worth of drugs in 2009. The drugs trade also contributes to the number of non-Islanders serving prison sentences on the Island: the prison population, at an average of 185 in 2011, represents 189 per 100,000 resident population, one of the higher ratios in Europe, but significantly inflated by non-resident drug offenders serving long sentences. In Jersey as elsewhere, the most common crimes are acquisitive.

The Background of the Study

This research project was proposed by the Jersey Probation and After Care Service and funded by the Senior Officer Group of Jersey’s Crime and Community Safety Strategy from 2001 to describe and document the Parish Hall Enquiry and the honorary system upon which it depends, in order to evaluate the role they play in the administration of justice in Jersey. The Jersey Probation and After-Care Service acted as managing agency for the research, which was conducted with the approval of the Comité des Connétables and Her Majesty’s Attorney General.

The research partnership between the University of Wales, Swansea and the Jersey Probation and After-Care Service goes back to 1996, when new risk assessment methods were introduced into the Service and the University was asked to help in validating them for Jersey and evaluating their use. From this developed a programme of research into the effectiveness of various sentences in reducing the risk of re-offending (see, for example, Miles and Raynor 2004; Raynor and Miles 2007). During the course of these activities it became increasingly clear that the Parish Hall Enquiry System was playing an important part in Jersey’s response to offending; that it was the focus of various proposals for enhancement or reduction of its role (for example, in the first ‘Clothier Report’ of 1996); and that there was little documentation of exactly how it currently worked, and no systematic evaluation of its impact or effectiveness within the criminal justice system. There was also some confusion about its status, generated largely by those (such as Clothier) who appeared to regard it as a kind of low-level court, rather than in accordance with its locally accepted basis as part of a discretionary prosecution process.

Briefly, it appeared to a number of participants in the system that it would be useful to have available some objective research on the Parish Hall Enquiry. In keeping with the purpose of the study, our focus has been on what actually happens and on what participants in the process think of it, with considerable reliance on direct observation of enquiries and on interviews with those involved both in the enquiries and in the wider system. It was not our task to comment on what should happen, for example by making recommendations about how the role of the Parish Hall Enquiry should develop in the future; instead, our aim was to contribute to the evidence-base which might in due course help to inform decisions about the future by those properly empowered to make them. However, we hope that this study can illuminate the recent and current and, by implication, the potential contribution of the Parish Hall Enquiry System to the maintenance of social peace and order in Jersey. The original summary report on the research was completed in 2005 and published on the Jersey Government website (Miles and Raynor 2005); this book gives a fuller account, including some more recent developments, and pays more attention to the wider implications.

Wider Criminological Issues

An important research question in this study concerned the extent to which the personal communication which lies at the heart of the Enquiry process is, or is not, of the kind which is likely to have a positive impact on the future behaviour of offenders. To develop methods of addressing this we drew on the growing criminological literature on ‘what works’ in communicating with and supervising offenders. This evidence-based approach to criminal justice has been one of the major international developments of the last two decades (for a recent overview see McNeill, Raynor and Trotter 2010); we aimed to draw on international research about ways of encouraging and reinforcing more pro-social attitudes and behaviour (e.g. Trotter 1999; Cherry 2005), and about ways of making it more likely that offenders will genuinely regret their actions and want to make amends in future (e.g. Braithwaite 1989). We hope that in its turn, this study will contribute to the international evidence-base.

In most countries such participatory and restorative criminal justice practices, and the organisational arrangements to support them, have to be developed from nothing, or revived after falling into disuse. In New Zealand precedents were found in traditional Maori culture, and in Canada attempts have been made to revive practices based on the traditions of the original inhabitants before European colonisation (Griffiths and Hamilton 1996; Pratt 1996; Stuart 1996; Pranis, Stuart and Wedge 2003). Hardly anywhere in the literature are there examples of traditional locally-based participatory alternatives to formal court processing which survive in modern Western societies as an integral part of current criminal justice systems. The Jersey Parish Hall Enquiry, with its broad scope, long history and basis in voluntary service to the community, is therefore of great interest, and deserves to be properly documented and recognised. There is also a wider interest in how everyday social practices in small communities can often exercise effective social control in informal ways, reducing the need for formal intervention by the criminal justice system.

The Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie has pointed out how informal and restorative practices are particularly appropriate to situations where people will continue to inhabit the same communities after the issue has been dealt with, and he links this to discussion of the social structure of neighbourhoods and, interestingly, islands (Christie 2004). The formal criminal justice process is only one way of handling unwanted behaviour, and sometimes it is advantageous to have ways of dealing with crimes without creating criminals. This research, therefore, is concerned with the development and implementation of criminal justice in Jersey, but we hope that its findings will also contribute to the wider literature about the possibilities and limitations of such approaches.

In particular, one question which has intrigued us throughout this enquiry is essentially one of typology: what sort of justice do the Parish Hall Enquiries represent? Our initial interest in the quality of communication and in the opinions and reactions of those involved drew on literature concerning the use of communication skills and ‘core correctional practices’ by professionals concerned in the rehabilitation of offenders, but similar interest in communication can now be found among advocates of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ (such as McGuire 2003) in which the formal processes of criminal justice are modified to perform a more problem-solving role, working in partnership with offenders who are trying to turn their lives around. In mainland Britain this approach is best represented by the Scottish drug courts (McIvor 2010) in which the power to follow up and review the progress of people under supervision leads to a quantity and level of problem-solving communication which has more in common with social work than with the traditional formalities of the court-room. At its best such communication seems to be mutually respectful, realistic and effective. Some aspects of the Parish Hall process (for example, the successful engagement of those attending in a dialogue about what has happened and what can be done about it) were reminiscent of therapeutic jurisprudence; others were more straightforwardly restorative, but often the restoration would be to the community rather than the individual victim. The use made of local knowledge and local community links and the rootedness of the Enquiry process in traditional Parish institutions points to similarities with experiments in the localisation of justice, or ‘community justice’ (see, for example, Brown and Payne 2007). So is the process typically one of therapeutic jurisprudence (albeit by volunteers rather than professionals), or restorative justice, or community justice, or a mixture of these?

Other questions which became increasingly salient for us during the research concerned legitimacy. In general the perception that the Parish Hall Enquiry was a legitimate and respected part of the criminal justice system seemed to be widespread among those who used it, but questions were also raised (both within the political process of the Island and directly in unsolicited correspondence with researchers) about whether the system complied fully with international requirements relating to human rights. Admittedly these came from people who had personal reasons to dislike the Parish Hall process, but they also raised important issues about its legitimacy. The legalistic concerns about human rights compliance were not, in our view, well-founded; however, it seems increasingly clear that perceived legitimacy, and the compliance with legal requirements which is facilitated by perceived legitimacy, are more a matter of how people believe they are being treated by authorities, and whether authorities are seen to be living up to expected standards. For example, research on the relationship between legitimacy and compliance regularly points to the importance of people’s perceptions that they are being treated fairly and that their point of view is being taken into account (Tyler 1990; Ugwudike 2010). We were interested in finding out what gave the Parish Hall Enquiry its perceived legitimacy, and how durable this might be in the face of social changes affecting the Island. The concepts of tradition and modernity were relevant here: whilst we did not necessarily see a conflict or an incompatibility between traditional and contemporary approaches to crime, we were interested in how they fitted together, and the tensions that could and did arise through the co-existence of elected voluntary parish-based police and a modern professional Island-wide police force.

These are complicated and nuanced questions which we invite the reader to bear in mind during the account that follows. We return to some of them later in the book. As practical people, we were also concerned with a fundamental ‘what works’ question: if, as we came to believe, the Parish Hall Enquiry System makes a very useful contribution to criminal justice and social order in Jersey, to what extent are its principles transferable? Is there anything for other countries or other jurisdictions to learn from what happens on a small island?

Certainly the nature of life and community in small islands is part of the background of our account. Anthropologists who have studied Greek islands (such as Just [2000] and Kenna [2001]) show how people in small communities, who have to go on living in close proximity to each other, need to deal with problems in ways which take this into account, often from indigenous resources with little or no outside assistance. This can provide a particularly favourable environment for reintegrative approaches to conflict which allow people to retain or regain their status and full membership in the community. Also it means that when a member of the community misbehaves, it is likely that much more is informally known about their character, history and background than simply the fact of misbehaviour, which becomes just one more piece of a rounded history and identity instead of a master narrative and a negative label. In such circumstances, people who offend are known as persons before and after they are known as offenders. As Christie puts it, ‘social distance is one of the necessary conditions for heavy use of the penal system’ (Christie 2004, 55), and life in small island communities tends to limit social distance. But this does not only happen on islands: Christie follows his discussion of Iceland with an account of what he calls his own ‘island’ which is in fact a low-income neighbourhood of Oslo, ‘a place for all sorts of people; some might be in official files with some sort of diagnosis. But in local neighbourhoods with much interaction, people do not remain only as diagnostic categories. People become characters’ (Christie 2004, 68).

This suggests that lessons learned on islands may well be applicable elsewhere. It also points to one of the difficulties of research in islands: much of what makes life there work is not easily accessible to outside researchers. Anthropologists studying more exotic islands sometimes live there for years before discovering important aspects of life or belief there; sadly, this was not an option for the external researcher in this study. Instead, we are a research team consisting of one indigenous researcher, who at the time of fieldwork for this study was working as a research and information officer in the Jersey Probation and After-Care Service, and one external researcher who is a criminologist based in a Welsh University. We hope that this combines the access to people and meanings, which an indigenous researcher provides, with the wider perspective and critical eye which the external researcher can bring to the material.

One further aspect of the study’s broader relevance emerged, rather to our surprise, late in the writing-up process. In 2010 the newly elected Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition Government of the United Kingdom announced its intention of introducing elected local Police and Crime Commissioners, and in due course they legislated on the matter (the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011) and elections were held on the 15 November 2012. This in effect created the first directly elected police officials in England and Wales, and was widely seen as a populist attempt to meet a perceived public demand for ‘tougher’ policing (though the exceptionally low turnout in the elections suggested little real public interest). Some time before the elections both authors were contacted by a journalist who had looked for other examples of elected police and found that Jersey appeared to have the only such police in the British Isles. His interest in the role of Jersey’s Centeniers (see Chapter 2) led him to our research, and a visit to Jersey resulted in a thoughtful piece in the Economist of 25 February 2012 which pointed out that elected police did not have to be ‘tough’ or punitive: he commended the Centeniers for using ‘thoughtful sanctions’ and ‘trying not to turn neighbours’ children into criminals’. Those two phrases sum up a large part of the content of this book.

Chapter 2
The Origins and History of Jersey’s Honorary Police

Introduction

This chapter describes the origins and history of the honorary system of Jersey and the development and role of the Parishes. In particular, the continuing strength of the Parishes as social and administrative units represents an unusual survival of a traditional form of social organisation, and forms the basis of the honorary policing system of which the Parish Hall Enquiry is a part.

The study of the history of the establishment and the development of these community institutions poses certain problems for the researcher. Whilst there are a number of sources which document the history of the Island, there is very little written prior to 1996 either about the Honorary Police or the Parish Hall Enquiry System. References to the Honorary Police usually refer to the ‘quaint custom’ of parish policing and attempt neither to describe the origins of the system nor to evaluate its effectiveness as an important instrument of the maintenance of peace and social order in the parishes. The important role played by the Parish Hall Enquiry System in the administration of justice in Jersey is largely ignored. The absence of literature is in itself interesting. Despite the unique nature of the policing system and t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by John Braithwaite
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Origins and History of Jersey’s Honorary Police
• 3 Research Strategy and Methods
• 4 The Parish Hall Enquiry
• 5 Compliance with Guidelines, and Available Figures for the Parish Hall Enquiry Process
• 6 Components of Effective Practice in Community-based Justice
• 7 Community-based Systems of Justice
• 8 Restorative Justice in Jersey: Repair, Reconciliation and Reassurance
• 9 Reintegrative Shaming in Action
• 10 The Future for Community Justice in Jersey
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index