Understanding the different UK justice systems

The presentation drew on work that I and my colleague, Roger Grimshaw, have been undertaking, to provide an up-to-date overview of the UK justice systems. The report of this work is due for publication a bit later this year.

One, mundane but important, conclusion I shared yesterday was that there is no single way of doing justice in the UK.

In England and Wales, for instance, 43 local police forces are each accountable to a directly-elected politician. Scotland and Northern Ireland have single ‘national’ forces, each overseen by a committee appointed by politicians.

The prosecution services operate differently across the different UK jurisdictions. The criminal court systems across the three UK jurisdictions have very different historical origins. Per capita prison populations in Northern Ireland are much lower than they are in Scotland and England and Wales.

By extension, there is also no 'gold' standard approach, in relation to which all others are inferior. Police accountability models based on an elected politician are not, inherently, superior to ones based on an appointed committee, or vice versa.

How those arrangements have emerged is down to a range of political, historical, social and cultural factors. What these factors are is arguably of more significance than the resulting institutions and structures.

We also discussed the significant role of civil society organisations, citizen mobilisation, and citizen protest in holding criminal justice bodies to account.

I was reminded of this during the visit I and colleagues made to the "War Inna Babylon" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which closes this weekend.

Curated by the racial advocacy and community organisation Tottenham Rights, the exhibition charts more than fifty years of grassroots activism for racial justice among Black frontline communities across the UK.

It closed at weekend but they are hoping to take it on tour in the coming months.