Specialty Courts: Current Issues and Future Prospects

Abstract

The reasons individual offenders engage in criminal activity are numerous and varied. Three key priority areas have emerged in recent years - reducing crime related to drug dependency and mental health, reducing the over-representation of Indigenous offenders and reducing the incidence of domestic violence. Policy-makers and criminal justice practitioners have recently responded with the development of specialty courts designed to tackle specific problem behaviour and associated issues. This paper examines the history and development of the specialty court concept in Australia. It shows that the programs, although having the same overall aim of reducing reoffending, have significantly different structures as they attempt to deal with very different problems. This paper also reviews the key evaluations of specialty court programs conducted to date. If we are to understand what works and what doesn't, long-term assessment and evaluations are required of all specialty courts. Toni Makkai Director Australia's criminal justice system has been witness to significant transformation, primarily in response to a number of important factors including: * community and political unease about perceived government failure to deal with crime and reduce offending rates * growing expectations of a more responsive and cost-effective criminal justice system * shifts in the intellectual paradigm concerning the roles and responsibilities of the criminal justice system in delivering therapeutic intervention (Jefferies 2003). There have also been a number of procedural innovations in recent years, from restorative justice to therapeutic-based interventions for offenders (Jefferies 2003). Specialty courts, sometimes called problem-solving or problem-oriented courts in the international literature, are one example where criminal justice systems have become intimately connected to the delivery of therapeutic and rehabilitative outcomes. Specialty courts, developed against a backdrop of policy orientation towards diversion from prison, are typically defined as new criminal court structures and procedures, developed to manage and deal with specific offender populations, where it is recognised that traditional criminal justice procedures have not been effective. Specialty courts are different from specialist jurisdiction courts, such as the environment and industrial courts or the children's court. These specialist jurisdiction courts 'have exclusive jurisdiction in a field of law presided over by a judicial officer with expertise in that area' (Freiberg 2001 :8). Freiberg provides greater detail about the differentiation between specialist jurisdiction and specialty courts. A core distinction is that specialty courts incorporate new and innovative court practices. These practices typically involve some level of judicial monitoring and cross-agency collaboration while seeking to achieve therapeutic outcomes. Specialty courts represent a move towards a model of justice that recognises the behavioural and environmental factors that contribute to offending, and the judicial system's capacity to deal with these problems (Freiberg 2001). Despite this growing area of court practice there has not been any national overview of developments to date. This paper reports on a national audit of specialty court programs conducted in December 2004. It provides a summary of their establishment and implementation and where available, evaluations of the programs. Australian specialty courts National audit, December 2004 The audit identified 19 programs operating across Australia as at 31 December 2004. Of these court programs: * nine were developed for dealing with drug dependent offenders * six were developed as alternative sentencing programs for Indigenous offenders * three were established for dealing with family and domestic violence * one targeted offenders with a mental impairment. …

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