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Podcast: The Bunker – News without the nonsense
Episode: Dire Magistrates: Who are Britain’s self-selecting arbiters of justice?
Description: Around 12,000 people in England and Wales volunteer as magistrates. That means they can sentence people to up to a year in prison. Yet they have barely any training and no legal qualifications. Penelope Gibbs, the director of Transform Justice, tells Ros Taylor about the problems with relying on a self-selecting, middle-class magistracy who may never have seen inside a jail. They talk about the difficulties in trying to hold remote hearings during the pandemic and how a cash-strapped system struggles to deliver justice.
“The training for magistrates is woeful, and I and others have been sa...