Six years ago, I visited the Old Bailey. I can still remember walking through the long dark hall making my way to one of the courtrooms.
If you’ve never been to a court room then it’s worth a visit purely because legal institutions seem to be designed to give an individual a particular experience. For example, take the role of the judge. The judge will always sit 2/3 metres higher than the rest of the participants in the court room. And, for an offender, this presumably makes you feel like your life ‘is in the hands’ of someone else – some one with authority.
We’ve recently started a new project looking to design a pathway for re-offenders with substance misuse and alcohol problems. At the moment, we are looking at the journey of re-offenders with these problems making their way through the criminal justice system - particularly their journey as probationers.
While we look at this ‘user’ journey, I find myself thinking about two things:
a) the relationship between crime, offender and punishment
b) the ‘users’ of the criminal justice system
Often, when we (or may be ‘I’) think about service design – we think about user-centred design that is supportive of the user’s needs. And in this project, we're designing a pathway that helps re-offenders in order to stop them from committing criminal acts. But what about the role of repentance here? How do we bring this into the design of this pathway? And, when designing a supportive pathway for an offender who keeps committing crimes to feed their habit, should we ignore the needs of the victims and witnesses who are also ‘users’ of the criminal justice system and have been affected by the crime committed?
These are big questions and ones we’re looking forward to thinking about during this project. If you have any thoughts about the above, then let me know. Very interested in hearing from service designers, different users of the criminal justice system and general public on this subject.
Comments
I think its interesting as
I think its interesting as the criminal justice system has many 'users' - defendants, witnesses, & jurors are all members of the public who interact with it. I don't think you can ignore their needs when looking at how you support repeat offenders to break the cycle of comitting crime.I think the idea of truth and reconcilition committees across the globe give an interesting model when trying to ensure that both parties have an equal voice and victims have a say in sentencing.It's probably also worth having a look at Restorative Circles that are in operation across the world http://www.restorativecircles.org/
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