Yet, aside from the challenges of money, there aren’t quick, simple solutions to the problems the justice ‘system’ faces. If there were, they would have happened a decade ago and we could have ridden into the sunset saying “it’s fixed”.

In 2005, I had the opportunity to spend time at Red Hook Centre for Court Innovation, a world-leading model for problem-solving courts in South Brooklyn, an area challenged with poverty, crime and racism. I’ve remained friends with the people from Red Hook for the last 15 years and they’ve written a book, Gradual, by Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox. It focuses on incrementalism as the key to changing the wicked issues that surround us.

For someone so keen on radical change, I railed against it. I don’t want gradual change in justice, I want it to change right now, or at least within the next few weeks, please. I don’t want to lose a stone in a year, I want to crash diet, regardless of the evidence that it won’t stay off, and in truth I will be back to my starting weight, or worse, in no time at all. The idea of incrementalism to achieve lasting and impactive change – getting the time to understand the problem, test out change, and achieve change means I need to develop a level of patience I have to work hard on.

Gradual’s authors explore the myriad of incremental interventions that are required to achieve lasting change using multiple examples from the changes in crime in New York: investment in policing, weeding out unsavoury police officers, using data to do hot-spot analysis. Yet, there are many things that look like incremental progression, but are big leaps.

For example, on women’s suffrage, the first act of parliament that gave women the vote in 1918 applied to women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. This is simultaneously an example of incrementalism (because it was the product of a ‘looooong’ making of the case in various ways, enabling the legislation to be conceived of and passed by a government of the day) and a radical evolutionary leap that enabled all other subsequent incremental change.

To do gradualism well requires us to imagine the ‘end state’. We need the shared ideal of the final goal to guard against the ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ policy-making that governments across the world seem to employ to get newspaper headlines about the issues of the day. Incrementalism doesn’t make headlines. It won’t occupy the front page, Twitter won’t be alive with excitement or opprobrium (sometimes in the same tweet). It requires us to stay the distance, commit to the journey, not jump from role to role but engage for the long term.

Incrementalism is generally examined and considered in retrospect when change is achieved and people are curious about the journey taken to achieve the result. “The evolution will not be televised” one editor wrote when reviewing the book, but then, good things come to those who wait, and work.

Karyn McCluskey is chief executive of Community Justice Scotland

Scotland's justice system must change but it may need to happen slowly – Karyn McCluskey