Blog post. Community Justice: An Opportunity to ‘Re-integrate’?

Situating Scotland’s approach to community justice alongside our European neighbours is something that deserves more press in political and academic circles. In 2018 we accepted the offer to update a comprehensive chapter on Scottish ‘probation’ for the Confederation of European Probation (CEP) – previously completed in 2008. In doing so – and by doing so in the level of detail and analysis required to cover vast areas of community justice – we found ourselves struck by just how closely Scotland aligns with Europe in our policy, legislation and practice. Yet, as we discovered through our research, this ‘Europeanness’ is not marked anywhere in our own official policy documents, nor has it been mentioned anywhere in discussions or debates on criminal justice in the Scottish parliament (according to the Minutes of Chamber Proceedings). This puzzled us.