In a recent TechUK blog, Katherine Beadle, Client Partner for Justice, Public Safety and Defence at NTT DATA UK&I, explored how technology can help ease this burden. The goal is to free up talented professionals, allowing them to focus on what they do best, and helping to improve outcomes across the system.
With Sir Brian Leveson, Dame Anne Owers, and the Rt Hon. David Gauke all leading reviews into the justice sector, it’s a pivotal moment for the UK justice sector. Prisons are overcrowded. Probation is under strain. Caseloads are at an all-time high, and professionals are weighed down by administrative burden that gets in the way of outcomes.
Indeed, the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts warns that “even with the Crown Court sitting at a historically high level, this would not be enough to make meaningful progress on reducing the outstanding caseload and bring down waiting times.”
This won’t come as a shock. The issues with overcrowding and sentencing are well-documented and, if there were a silver bullet, it would have been fired a long time ago.
That said, the situation is fixable – and with the right level of investment, we can reduce crime, deliver faster justice for victims and prioritise rehabilitation, all without compromising on fairness or public safety.
The system’s greatest strength
The backbone of the justice system is the people who show up every day to keep it running, police officers, probation workers, prosecutors, barristers, and civil servants. If we can connect up the justice system to align the priorities and performance markers of each constituent part, we can give those individuals a chance to focus on what they’re good at.
Connected justice isn’t about merging people and systems together into an amorphous mass. It means respecting what each person brings to the table and sanding down the layers of friction that distract them from fully exercising their professional judgement.
Meeting strategic government targets
As the current reviews make clear, the status quo is no longer workable. Systemic issues, from paper-based workflows to siloed data, are limiting the sector’s ability to process cases efficiently, and reduce reoffending.
Justice sector workers are not inherently less productive than they were ten or fifteen years ago. In many cases, they’re working faster and harder than ever before. It’s the rise in cases, exacerbated by a gruelling pandemic, a subsequent inflation in workloads, and a continued reliance on paper-based processes that has upset the system to this extent. The result is real morale and retention issues in areas like probation.
Take police officers, for instance. Without an easier way to redact documents or manage complex disclosure processes, case progression stalls. But give them time back to work in communities and with local agencies, and suddenly, we’re making progress on the government’s Safer Streets mission.
Technology can bridge the gap
Technology is not a replacement for professional judgement, but it can be a powerful enabler. It can help connect a probation officer, a prison officer, and a safeguarding lead around a single citizen profile. It can summarise case documents for prosecutors in seconds. It can offer risk scores to support parole decisions or optimise cell space in overcrowded prisons.
We’ve already seen this in action with the Crown Prosecution Service, where generative AI is helping free up time for more value-added work. In each case, the domain expert stays in control, but they’re working with better tools and clearer insight.
None of these involve a computer making management decisions. The domain expert stays in control. The technology just offers them enough information to boost productivity in their usual decision-making process.
An incremental approach to innovation
You’ll have heard plenty about the benefits of generative AI and, before that, low code and cloud. But implementation is a different game altogether. When you’re stuck in the day-to-day and trying to keep things running, it can feel like an ambitious goal to launch a whole-new initiative from scratch. That’s why I’d recommend starting small.
A system that, down the line, might save thousands of person-hours in context switching between legal cases doesn’t need to spring into existence complete with policy papers and technical documentation. Instead, it needs an incremental approach to innovation.
You can move forwards in a structured way by running proofs-of-concept at the smallest viable level, see what works on the ground and then use that to scale up and meet demand from the centre. It’s the user feedback, from lawyers to probation officers, that will let you determine what solutions are deliverable now or could be viable in the long-term.
To explore this topic further, read the full piece on TechUK.