Leveraging technology to alleviate caseload pressure in the UK justice system

Implementing technology for a more efficient and connected justice system

With Sir Brian Leveson, Dame Anne Owers, and the Rt Hon. David Gauke all leading reviews into the justice sector, it’s a fraught time.[i] Prisons are overcrowded. Probation is under strain. Caseloads are at an all-time high, and everyone’s dealing with an 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.”[ii]

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 lower crime and make justice swifter for victims, while ensuring punishment is served and rehabilitation is prioritised.

The strength of the UK’s criminal justice system lies with its people. Those who offer their time and effort to make this country a safer place: police and probation officers, prosecutors, barristers, and civil servants alike. 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 Leveson, Owers, and Gauke’s reviews rumble on, one point has been made clear. The status quo is unworkable. Broad, systemic factors have impeded the justice system’s ability to understand and respond to risk in real time, bring cases to court in a timely manner, sentence fairly and proportionately, and cut down on recidivism rates. To create a solution, we’ll have to change the paradigm.
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.[iii]  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.  A police officer does a hard enough job already. Without a manageable way for them to redact documents and navigate complex disclosure requirements, it won’t get any easier to move cases forwards. But if an officer is freed up to spend more time in the local community and work alongside partner agencies, that’s one step towards the government’s Safer Streets mission.[iv]

Deploying Technology in the Justice Sector

Technology, in this context, is a way to bridge the gap between a specialist justice system worker and their counterparts. It can play the intermediary between a probation officer, a prison officer, and a police safeguarding lead – all bringing together different parts of the same risk profile to understand the citizen in question more completely. 

Meanwhile, there are numerous other opportunities for tools like generative AI to save time on repetitive, data-intensive tasks. This could mean intelligent case summarisation for prosecutors, as we’ve helped the Crown Prosecution Service implement. It may include optimising cell space in prisons, or even supporting judicial decision-making for parolees by offering risk scores based on analysis of historical data. 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 we 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, we recommend 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. This might draw on low-code or Software-as-a-Service technologies – these initiatives can be much lower cost and experimentation can be done rapidly and visibly with the users involved.

Ultimately, the goal of connected justice is immediate impact. The insights from each agency coming together on a foundation of interoperable standards to create a centralised view of the citizen. If we want a more efficient, predictive, and proportionate justice system, that’s where I would start.