Volume 21 (Issue 1)

Welcome

Community Justice in a Devolved Jurisdiction: Introduction to the Special Issue

Jamie Buchan & Beth Weaver

Welcome to this special issue of the British Journal of Community Justice on ‘Community Justice in Scotland’.

When the Act of Union was passed in 1707, Scotland became part of the United Kingdom but retained separate criminal law and justice arrangements. For nearly 300 years after this, legislation affecting Scotland (including criminal law) was passed at Westminster, on Scotland’s behalf. By the mid-20th century, Scottish policy was developed in the Scottish Office of the UK government.

It was in this context that Scotland’s distinctive system of community penalties developed, following directly from the 1964 report by Lord Kilbrandon on Scottish juvenile courts. Noting that criminal and family court proceedings often centred on the same children, Kilbrandon proposed that children who offend should be treated not as culpable ‘young offenders’ but as ‘children in trouble’. This led to the most distinctive institution of Scottish criminal justice – the children’s hearings system, a set of lay panels which hears cases involving any aspect of child welfare (with offence referrals making up only a minority of its business). Children’s hearings replaced the majority of juvenile courts in Scotland, and remain the default for dealing with children’s offending deemed serious enough to require a justice response.

The ‘Kilbrandon philosophy’ also informed developments in adult justice. The 1968 Social Work (Scotland) Act created not only the children’s hearings system, but also new social work departments within Scotland’s local authorities. These departments assumed broad responsibilities for the promotion of social welfare, in line with a wider egalitarian social policy project (Brodie et al., 2008). Scotland’s probation service (which had existed in some form since 1907 and on a statutory footing since 1931) was abolished, and its functions merged into the new social work departments.

Thus, instead of probation officers, Scotland now has a justice specialism within local authority social work services, generally known as Justice Social Work (JSW – previously Criminal Justice Social Work). Its responsibilities include: the supervision of people serving community sentences, as well as those on conditional release from prison and on supervised bail pending trial; the provision of information to criminal courts to assist decision-making about sentencing; and working within prisons to support reintegration before and after release, including on licence.

The 1968 Act was not only essential in establishing the JSW system but also symbolic of a certain ‘exceptionalist’ view of Scottish criminal justice, especially by comparison with England and Wales (though it is worth noting that Westminster came close to passing similarly radical legislation for England and Wales in the late 1960s). Arrangements under the 1968 Act have arguably protected Scottish community penalties from the punitiveness, actuarialism and marketisation that have textured English probation. Professional social work training and its attendant theory and practice frameworks remain core, in contrast to the ‘de-social worked’ probation of England and Wales – even while much else in Scottish criminal justice, politics and society has changed markedly (Buchan et al., 2025).

Sited within this distinctive historical and institutional context, our special issue includes contributions from practitioners and academics at various career stages, spanning social work practice and sociological policy analysis, in keeping with a long tradition of practitioner research in community justice. Simon Gittins reviews the literature on restorative justice in response to sex offences, setting out a research agenda for empirical research around multiagency supervision. Jihad Diab outlines the work of the Risk Management Authority, a uniquely Scottish institution, and presents research on the Order for Lifelong Restriction – a sentence with similarities to England and Wales’ notorious Imprisonment for Public Protection, but which has attracted less controversy – the challenges of reintegration for people under this sentence, and the implications for justice social work practice.

Other articles in this issue respond, from a community justice perspective, to wider issues in Scottish justice. The particular experiences and vulnerabilities facing women in criminal justice, highlighted in the Commission on Women Offenders’ (2012) report, led to policy efforts to improve conditions for women in prison and under community supervision. Jessica Cleary discusses the history of Scotland’s efforts to provide gender-specific community justice services for women, warning that progress remains precarious and the services themselves increasingly carceral. Maria Fotopoulou and Margaret Malloch examine the recent opening of Scotland’s (and the UK’s) first ever Safer Drug Consumption Facility in Glasgow, how it took so long to get to this stage, and the gap between policy and implementation. These are given heightened relevance by recent developments in these spaces: the opening of new ‘Community Custody Unit’ prisons for women in Glasgow and Dundee (alongside the closure of the 218 Centre – a well-established and successful third-sector women’s project in Glasgow – Nellis, 2023), and Scotland’s appalling rates of deaths involving drug use.

Another recent controversy surrounds a proposal to create a National Care Service for Scotland – which, it had been suggested, could include JSW alongside all other social work. After nearly three years of frustrating uncertainty, the plans have now been dropped altogether, but – as Jamie Buchan and Beth Weaver argue in the final article – the discussions around the NCS are illustrative of wider tendencies in criminal justice and social care reform to imagine restructuring as a solution to what remain complex and longstanding problems, largely fuelled by underfunding and wider social and economic problems.

There are, inevitably, gaps in what can be covered. There is an emphasis in this issue on justice services provided by, or on behalf of, the state. There is relatively little discussion of the third sector, and still less on non-state-led responses to crime and harm – responses in which ‘communities’ (as opposed to specific sets of localised institutions) may play a far more prominent role. Readers with an interest in such responses may find it helpful to read the recent special issue (Volume 20, Issue 1) on ‘Abolitionism and Community Justice’.

Furthermore, community justice, JSW and indeed justice more widely are of course not immune or impervious to the promises and potential pitfalls of ‘The Technological Society’ as forecasted by Ellul (1954). Ellul’s warning about the erosion of human agency, critical thinking and ethical, value-based and rights-informed decision making and practice find resonance with Mike Nellis’ (2017) similarly prescient analysis of ‘digital justice’ in Scotland and, latterly, the advent and advancement of Artificial Intelligence (Nellis, 2024). Contemporary debates and concerns cohere around its potential to automate rather than augment human thinking and decision-making, and speculation around its anticipated costs and effects are prevalent. Calls for ethical regulation are necessarily apposite in a justice context where issues of human liberty, privacy, rights and security are at issue. Heeding pleas for increased transparency, accountability, explainability and auditability in its development must be taken as seriously as ‘promises’ of its potential effects on efficiencies and efficacies.

Recent critiques of Scottish criminal justice have highlighted its increasingly ‘pervasive’ character (McNeill, 2018) and its very high rates of community penalties – a rate which has seemingly failed to produce any reduction in Scotland’s similarly high rates of imprisonment. This is among the points highlighted by Mike Nellis in his review of the new textbook Criminal Justice in Scotland (Routledge, August 2025), the first such title to appear for a decade. While the Scottish system is distinctive (if not necessarily ‘exceptional’), we also experience many of the same issues as other jurisdictions. Hence, we hope this issue will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and other interested parties beyond as well as within Scotland.

We are extremely grateful to all the authors and to the editorial team, Kevin Wong, Anton Roberts at PERU and Stephanie Wallace at Lancaster University for their support (and patience) as we worked on putting this issue together. We especially thank Professor Mike Nellis as the originator of the project.

References

Brodie, I., Nottingham C. and Plunkett, S. (2008) A Tale of Two Reports: Social Work in Scotland from Social Work and the Community (1966) to Changing Lives (2006). British Journal of Social Work 38(4): 697-715.

Buchan, J., Anderson, S. and Morrison, K. (2025) Criminal Justice in Scotland. Routledge.

Commission on Women Offenders (2012). Commission on Women Offenders: Final Report. Commission on Women Offenders.

Ellul, J. (1954) The Technological Society. Vintage Books, Random House.

McNeill, F. (2018) Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervsion. Emerald.

Nellis, M. (2017) Setting the parameters of ‘digital (criminal) justice’ in Scotland. Probation Journal 64(3), 191-208.

Nellis, M. (2023, November 27) Did opening of new custody unit spell the end of valued 218 service? Letter to The National. https://www.thenational.scot/community/23949040.opening-new-custody-unit-spell-end-valued-218-service/

Nellis, M. (2024) Artificial Intelligence and correctional practice: The Council of Europe draft Recommendation on the use of AI in Prisons and Probation. The Journal of Offender Monitoring 11-16. Retrieved 19/9/25 from https://www.civicresearchinstitute.com/online/PDF/JOM-3701-02-Nellis-AI.pdf