Success cannot be reduced to statistics, senior judges say

On a panel at the Bugmy Bar Book’s Solution Focused Justice Symposium, Justice Yehia said she heeded a strong warning from a colleague to “not buy into” evaluations of reoffending statistics.

Now in its fourth year, the success of the Walama List should not be evaluated in those figures but in feedback from participants, loved ones, victims who have engaged in the process, elders, service providers, the community and the lawyers, Justice Yehia said.

“If you have somebody who has come before the system and has a long record of very serious offending, and they go on the Walama program or a program like it and do really well, and then a year or two later get charged with unlicensed driving, does that count? Is that a cross? Is that something that demonstrates failure? It shouldn’t,” the judge said.

“I think the better evaluation is qualitative evaluations. I think that it’s a much more meaningful process of evaluating something if you actually talk to the people who have gone through the process.”

Speaking exclusively to Lawyers Weekly after the panel, Justice Yehia said it was “extremely important” that there continues to be real investment in culturally informed justice programs and courtrooms.

“How do you really achieve that? How do you meaningfully succeed in reducing the reoffending rates? We have to be serious about answering those questions, and in my 36 years’ experience, the best way to do that is to invest in therapeutic programs, diversionary programs, early intervention programs, and in solution-focused judging and courts.

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“You have to provide them with the services and scaffolding to actually change and be able to change,” Justice Yehia said.

Also in conversation with Lawyers Weekly, Justice Louise Taylor (Kamilaroi woman) said the more useful evaluation is to see how people in the system – including participants and victims, as well as the community around them – “see the value of the process, feel centred in the process, heard by the process, and then invest in that process”.

In the ACT Supreme Court’s pilot Circle Sentencing List, legal practitioners are also encouraged to go beyond the statistics and the evaluations of their client’s to tell their individual story.

“One of the things that I think is critical to think about is the trust that these processes can build with communities who are often coming from a position of being marginalised from those systems, where it is Aboriginal people or other groups,” Justice Taylor said.

“Trust is difficult to measure, and how do you count that? So I think it’s important to understand what value you are placing on the process so you can truly measure what the effect of it is.”

The Koori Court within the Magistrates Court of Victoria, headed up by supervising Magistrate Rose Falla (Wotjobaluk, Wemba Wemba and Mutti Mutti woman), was praised at the symposium for being “a leader in solutions-focused justice” and held in “very high regard”.

Talking to Lawyers Weekly at the event, Falla said the Koori court has restored cultural practices and provided wraparound services that have significantly altered justice outcomes for First Nations people.

On the question of quantitative versus qualitative evaluations, Falla said the success rate is higher when people are involved in the process.

“I couldn’t agree more with what defines success – it really can be the date, the how, the time between court appearances, the volume of charges, the type of charges, if they’re not failing to appear, if they’re actually coming to court,” Falla told Lawyers Weekly.

“[It’s also] if they’re coming with support, where family members have dropped off in the past because it’s the rotating door [of justice], and it’s often the willingness to be open to that next part of their journey.”

On the panel, Justice Yehia said one of the things that most surprised her in the early days of Walama was the number of defence lawyers and prosecutors who came up to say they felt they were “actually doing something important” for the first time in their careers.

“Some of those lawyers have been working in the system for a long time, and that’s not something I expected. Why isn’t that a legitimate measure of evaluation [for] these courts?” Justice Yehia said.

“That type of qualitative evaluation is much more effective.”