All new justices of the peace (JPs) should be required to visit a prison as an essential part of their training for sitting on the bench, the Magistrates Association has said.
The demand for the Ministry of Justice to include the visits in training, which was unanimously supported at the association’s annual conference, comes at a time when official expenditure on professional development has been declining sharply.
Magistrates courts deal with 95% of all criminal cases but a report by the justice select committee last month questioned the MoJ’s commitment to preparing JPs for service. It said the training was “sometimes too narrow to equip magistrates for the role that they are expected to fulfil”.
Responding to the committee’s concerns, the MA’s annual general meeting in Chester last Saturday passed a motion calling for prison visits to become a key element of training.
Proposed by the Welsh magistrate John Viney and the Cheshire magistrate David Pearce, it declared that: “This AGM believes that prison visits (including to women’s prisons and young offenders’ institutions) are an essential part of magistrates’ training.”
Such visits are not currently part of formal training. In some areas, individual magistrates have to make their own arrangements in order to obtain a firsthand look at prison conditions.
Around four in every 100 cases that come before magistrates result in offenders being sent to prison.
The compulsory element of training involves 18 hours or three days of preparation, including court observations and mentoring sessions. Magistrates believe there has been a fall in the number of prison visits arranged for JPs, and that this is due to cost-cutting.
The committee’s report noted that they were “impressed by magistrates’ commitment to training and their willingness to give their time to doing it”. The MPs expressed concern about a deterioration in training – according to the Judicial College expenditure on magistrates’ training dropped from £72 per sitting magistrate in 2009-10 to £30 in 2013-14.
Malcolm Richardson, the chairman of the MA, which represents JPs in England and Wales, said: “Sending offenders to prison, within the strict parameters of the sentencing guidelines, is one of the toughest decisions magistrates have to take on behalf of society. We therefore believe that seeing prison through visitation should be an essential part of judicial training for magistrates.
“At present, prison visits vary significantly from bench to bench and we’re making the case to the lord chancellor that the Ministry of Justice should fully implement this as an essential training requirement. We look forward to its swift implementation.”
