“Tain’t what you call it, It’s the way that you do it”
My apologies for the lame title and a cultural reference that nobody under 50 probably understands, obviously I am showing my age.
For the uninitiated, Out-of-Court Resolutions (OoCRs) are used in England and Wales to allow police to deal with appropriate offences without taking the case to court. A Police officer can attach “conditions” or actions to an OoCR intended to repair harm and address offending behaviour, taking victims’ views into account. If the actions are completed, no further action will be taken, if unmet, the case may still proceed to court. In Scotland and the United States, related approaches are called Deflection or Diversion, although these operate at different stages and are not direct equivalents.
Common conditions issued by police include; completing a course, such as anger management, attending drug treatment intervention or paying damages to the victim. The purpose is to create an opportunity to make good what happened and reduce the chance of it happening again. The evidence supports the effectiveness of OoCRs in reducing reoffending and increasing victim satisfaction. At Make Time Count we are all in favour of forces making greater use of such levers.
Research from the United States highlights why expanding use of diversionary measures must go hand in hand with effective delivery. Issuing more resolutions creates more opportunities. Following through is how we make those opportunities count.
It’s quantity and quality that matters.
Published in 2022, Criminal Justice Diversion and the Importance of Program Retention examined 757 participants in an Oklahoma justice-navigation programme supporting people at pre-trial or probation stages.
The reported outcomes were striking:
- Only around 11% (81) of those diverted completed the programme.
However:
- 3.7% of successful completers were re-arrested.
- 31.2% of those who disengaged were re-arrested.
- Across all participants, the rate was 27.6%, close to the 28.4% local comparison rate.
The obvious question is whether those 4% who completed were already more motivated, better supported or less likely to reoffend. How much of the difference reflects the programme, and how much reflects who stayed engaged? This study cannot separate those effects.
For policing and justice leaders, key questions should sit at the centre of how we design, commission and evaluate diversion. Addressing concerns such as:
- How do we ensure the person reaches the right service?
- How do we track whether they attend?
- Does anyone notice when they stop engaging?
- What feedback, in both directions, do we collect?
- Are conditions completed?
- Are the victim’s wishes followed through?
- How do we leverage these findings to continually improve our service offering
The conclusion for UK practice is straightforward: we need to put equal, if not more, thought into delivering a resolution as into issuing one. It is not sufficient to offer a simple condition that “ticks the box”
Consider a person given a condition to attend an intervention. The officer records the decision and sends a referral. From an administrative perspective, the case has moved forward.
What happens if the provider cannot contact them? If the appointment clashes with work and rescheduling becomes burdensome? If they do not understand the instructions? If they miss the first session and nobody follows up? What if attendance is recorded, but nobody checks whether the person understood the material or found it useful or relevant? What happens when 70%+ of those attending these courses show no signs of changing behaviour?
A referral may be correctly recorded, box ticked, while the opportunity for change quietly disappears.
Effective delivery requires clear ownership throughout the journey. Demands real time multi-agency collaboration. Police need to know whether the referral was accepted, whether support started, whether attendance continued and whether the agreed conditions were fulfilled, what the offender thought of the service and what they thought of them.
This means treating disengagement as something to investigate. A missed appointment might reflect unwillingness to participate. It might also reveal a practical obstacle that can be addressed. Practitioners need enough information to distinguish between the two and make a proportionate decision.
Supporting someone to meet their obligations and holding them accountable should work together.
Victims should be part of this delivery discipline. Where a resolution includes reparation, compensation or another agreed action, we should be able to establish whether it happened. Recording a victim’s wishes creates an obligation to follow through and explain the outcome.
This has implications for commissioning.
Counting resolutions issued or referrals made tells us about activity. To understand effective delivery, commissioners should also ask:
- How many participants started and completed their intervention?
- Where did people disengage, and why?
- How quickly were missed appointments or stalled referrals addressed?
- Were agreed conditions and victim-related actions completed?
- What happened subsequently across the whole participant group?
- What do participants and providers tell us about the intervention,
- How does that feedback improve future delivery??
Reporting outcomes for everyone matters. An impressive result among completers will always be accompanied by the proportion who completed but reoffended and what happened to those who did not complete. Otherwise, we risk rewarding services for the people easiest to retain while overlooking those who need more help.
This is where technology earns its place.
At Make Time Count, our focus is on helping police and delivery partners connect decisions with action: coordinating referrals, tracking conditions, recording progress and making outstanding work visible. Our platform was co-designed with forces and partners around real-time multi-agency collaboration, not as an afterthought. Our engagement with staff and users throughout our inception meant we incorporated the often overlooked voice of the end user, and ensured for example that feedback (good and bad) was captured.
Our purpose is to give practitioners the information they need to intervene while there is still an opportunity to help. Behavioural science, or “nudges” support delivery and completion. A feature has value when it prompts a timely conversation, resolves a stalled referral or identifies an unmet obligation.
Our work with the Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing (CCEBP) on AI and data analytics aims to help practitioners understand which interventions work, for whom and under what circumstances and use that evidence to inform future referrals.
In our vision, technology enables practitioners and service providers. The technology is the “plumbing” to reduce the friction, making it easier for officers, victims, offenders and service providers to work together. This is when what is often referred to as the “light bulb moment” happens. We aim to increase the number of connections for those moments to occur. Investment in those service providers remains essential.
Out-of-court resolutions should be measured, not by the number issued but in fulfilled obligations, meaningful engagement and better outcomes for victims and communities resulting from a measurable reduction in re-offending.
Issuing an OoCR or Deflection merely opens the door. Effective delivery is the work of helping someone get through it, turning a connection into an opportunity for lasting change.