The Slow Grind of Justice !

That old maxim of " Justice delayed is justice denied " certainly applies in our court system.  The tenet that an accused must be promptly put before a judge and the matter decided is a fallacy if that person is denied bail and spends months in a prison cell awaiting the case to appear on a judge's docket.

In recent years our bail laws have been tightened.  More and more people are finding themselves on remand and in particular it seems that young people the courts recognise as " children " stay behind bars for longer than the usual sentence for the crime for which they are accused.   The figures for 2018 show that 204 citizens walked free after a long period on remand when their hearing ended in acquittal.

Unfortunately, this is a situation that is steadily deteriorating. More than two hundred people spent more than a year in jail before being acquitted and this is an increase of  thirty percent since 2014.
That period on remand can take a heavy toll on the prisoner's quality of life.  Not only are they separated from their family, they often suffer both a loss of job and housing,.

Defence lawyers are aware that bail refusal usually increases the risk of a custodial penalty because waiting on remand is seen as a degree of criminality.  In many cases the person is freed on the basis of " time served " when that time in remand is taken into account.

In today's world the courts are often forced to wait until the prosecution is ready to proceed and that can be caused by delays in processing the wonderful array of crime detecting paraphernalia that is constantly coming on stream to aid law enforcement.   The speed of the trial is usually influenced by the delays that take place in laboratories as evidence is sifted and joins the waiting list on the basis of the crime priority.

What seems obvious is that the front end of the justice system is not keeping up with the back end.  There is not a great deal of alignment between bail refusal and what someone is ultimately sentenced to, if anything.  Serving a sentence in prison is an expensive option that the courts seek to avoid.

Delay seems likely to further increase  the numbers held on remand.   We are certainly remanding more people than before and the figures are compelling. They increased from 472 in 2013/14 to 781 in 2017/18, a rise of  sixty-five percent over five years.

What is alarming is the tendency for children to be remanded and spend time rubbing shoulders with hardened criminals in our prison system.  It is often said that the prison system is the university of criminology and we may be unwittingly turning out people with crime diplomas by our overuse of the remand system.