Community Justice Scotland's Karyn McCluskey on hidden cost of Covid

This was a response to a depressing series of figures in the early years of this century which had led to Scotland – Glasgow in particular – collecting a clean sweep of the planet’s global delinquency awards: Knife Crime Capital of the World and Murder Capital of Europe.

There were 137 murders in 2005 and Strathclyde Police knew that the old ways of addressing violent crime weren’t working and that they had to form fresh approaches to treating it. Thus, the Violence Reduction Unit was born and Karyn McCluskey, the Falkirk-born forensic psychologist, was tasked with making it work. It was her report into violence reduction which had led to this.

Rather than pursuing reactionary and punitive measures to curb violence she sought to embed the idea that it was a disease with root causes in poverty and social alienation that could eventually be cured. For the first time, these communities were being heard within a multi-agency approach.

The results were phenomenal. By 2018 Scotland’s murder rate had dropped to 59 – fewer than half the 2005 figure – and the Violence Reduction Unit became the model for similar initiatives across the world.

The Kevin McKenna Interview: How a few good men fought Franco and fascism

Ms McCluskey is now seeking to deploy this approach across all those sectors in Scotland where underlying currents of poverty, addiction and multi-deprivation drive depressing outcomes. In her current role as chief executive of Community Justice Scotland she seeks to ‘nudge’ all of the agencies that maintain and foster community cohesion to favour what she calls ‘smarter’ approaches to crime and punishment.

We’re discussing some of the hidden consequences of Covid that have yet to be fully analysed and understood as the cost-of-living crisis has followed hard on the heels of the pandemic. She’s looking at the challenges facing marginalised groups and communities.

“Problems associated with poverty were exacerbated during the pandemic,” she says, “especially in relation to addiction, isolation and not being able to reach out for help. Consequently, our GPs are experiencing a tsunami of harms because preventative medicine was generally on hold. No wonder they are feeling overwhelmed.

“Of all the groups taking the brunt of Covid’s impact, I feel for our young people who rely on contact with peers, school and outdoor activities to grow and develop the skills for life. So many teachers have noted that the young people haven’t developed skills to navigate the challenges in school life: petty arguments escalate and teachers are having to support young people to develop resilience and soft skills.

“Young people have often been locked down in homes where domestic abuse, addictions and parents who are experiencing huge stresses. It’s no surprise that young people have been affected so significantly. I attended a school prize-giving recently where the parents stood to applaud the teachers for what they did for their children during that time.”

I’ve been particularly concerned about the hidden ways that lockdown increased the dangers faced by those with violent partners. Have we given this as much attention as we ought to have?

“This issue came up during many early conversations,” she says. “It centred on individuals in a domestically abusive relationship and then having to face the added stress of the lockdown – people losing their jobs, their income their freedom – it was catastrophic. Many people access services when a partner is out of the house; go to safe spaces away from their own homes or someone external sees a black eye or an injury and offers help. So much domestic abuse will have occurred which has been unseen and unnoticed, and many will have had intolerable existences.”

Having witnessed the success of the Violence Reduction Unit, Ms McCluskey now wants to encourage a ‘community first’ approach in courtrooms when it comes to sentencing for lower-level offending. Scotland is one of Europe’s most assiduous jailers and this includes an unacceptably high number of female offenders.

“Allowing people to repay the harm they’ve caused in the community through unpaid work must become a more favoured option,” she says. “That and addressing some of the drivers of their offending. There are no excuses for crime, but there are loads of reasons.

“Remand is a major issue – we have too many people who are untried and un-convicted (or presumed innocent) in prison, placing even more pressure on that service. This also hinders the valuable, productive work that the prison service wants to do.

Kevin McKenna: Why Pele mattered in a monochrome Glasgow childhood

"Again, a community-first approach should be taken, keeping people who are not yet tried or who pose little or no danger to the safety of fellow citizens, in their communities. There they’re connected to all the important relationships and support networks needed for a productive life.

“We always seem to focus on the negative but Scotland’s crime rate has dropped massively in the last 20-30 years, and we know so much more about how our young people’s brains develop and this can help us keep them out of the justice system.”

She salutes the work of the police in this period. “When Sir Robert Peel set up policing, he stated that the absence of crime and disorder would be the litmus test of good policing, that it would be about prevention. Police Scotland is transformed in relation to this. It encompasses early help in police custody: linking up with services around mental health, addiction and connecting those who come to the attention of the police. It’s phenomenal.

“They are identifying people who are at risk: those who are vulnerable and working with other services to make their lives better and not worse. It makes the country safer for everyone. This work often proceeds beneath the radar – prevention is hard to measure – but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I’m lucky enough to meet people whose lives are changed by it.”

I venture the opinion that it’s hardly surprising we jail so many people when those passing sentence are disproportionately drawn from a gilded, affluent, privately-educated class who have no notion of the poverty-related challenges of those who come before them. Yet she remains optimistic that knowledge about the benefits of alternatives to jail is beginning to break through to those who wield authority in our courtrooms.

“There is a well-worn phrase from the US justice system: ‘Jail those you are afraid of, not those you are mad at’,” she says. “We have complex people in the system – homeless, traumatised, care-experience – but who also cause harm. I see so many sheriffs across the country now seeking to apply real problem-solving when sentencing. They are supported by great social workers and those working in the third sector. This changes lives, families and communities.”

I raise the problem of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. The same neighbourhoods have always featured down the decades.

Karyn McCluskey, though, gently rebukes what she regards as lazy narratives that frame our responses. “They rarely focus on the real people who have real homes and families and who volunteer and look out for their friends’ children. There are so many of them and they are real assets.

Kevin McKenna: Trade unions are not the right target for our anger

“That list should convict those of us in positions of power. It says we’ve let those people down; that we haven’t provided the services or investment or infrastructure to help people thrive. We should be apologising to them. These places have been home to families across many generations. They know where the problems lie and the gaps where the services fail to reach. They don’t need to see themselves being reduced to numbers by out-of-touch journalists and entirely without nuance. It’s condescending and insulting.”

She uses words like ‘empathy’ and ‘enlightened’ and ‘caring’ a lot: they all form the reviled, soft-touch lexicon that haunts the front pages of the more scabrous of Scotland’s right-wing tabloids. Ms McCluskey, though, has the numbers and the results to back up her philosophy.

She is also the champion of the unseen work being done in communities by remarkable people who don’t wear uniforms and who don’t work in big buildings. These are the ones who strive each day to embed community justice in their neighbourhoods and help their own people live better lives.