Injustice by design: A chronotopic analysis of homelessness and the hybrid court system

Abstract

After a century of inertia, Canadian courtrooms have undergone rapid transformation for the past 6 years. The move toward digital and hybrid proceedings has exposed the deep spatial and temporal structures on which courts rely, while also reshaping how participants access justice. For people experiencing homelessness, long-standing challenges navigating the court system have intensified during this period of technological change. We argue that while modernization efforts and workarounds offered by outreach workers can temporarily mitigbut ate some obstacles, they do not fundamentally alter the conditions that render the court system inaccessible to unhoused people. Drawing on interviews with 18 professionals who assist unhoused people through the court process, we use a chronotopic analysis to examine how court and street spacetime intersect in court proceedings, shaping legal participation. We show how spatio-temporal exclusions persist, and are in some cases reproduced, within hybrid court settings.

Introduction

Over the past 6 years, the court system has undergone significant expansion in the use of digital technologies. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift, courts were already moving away from their centuries-old reliance on face-to-face proceedings and paper-based documentation (Viglione et al., 2023). In Canada, the pandemic necessitated a rapid transition to remote hearings, first through videoconferencing and later Zoom, to maintain court operations (Government of Canada, 2021). This transformation, now reflected in the widespread use of virtual and hybrid proceedings across the country (Webster et al., 2023), has not only altered how courts function but has also made visible, and in some cases intensified, long-standing assumptions about spatial stability and temporal availability. These assumptions are not incidental; they are embedded within the organization and practice of law itself, such that the injustices we examine are by design, arising from processes deliberately grounded within court spacetime.

While digital adaptations occurred across all areas of the legal system, this article focuses specifically on criminal court processes, where the stakes of non-appearance or delayed participation are especially high and can result in immediate penal consequences. The pandemic created an opportunity to address long-standing barriers to court participation, yet systemic, spatial and temporal inequities largely persist, especially for people who have the least resources and power to traverse the system, namely people experiencing homelessness. Hybrid courts exemplify this continuity: while they offer new modes of participation, they have not fundamentally changed the conditions that make the court system inaccessible to unhoused people. Modernization efforts and workarounds provided by outreach workers may temporarily ease participation, but structural barriers continue to shape how unhoused people navigate the legal process.

This article uses chronotopes as an analytical lens to examine access to justice in hybrid criminal courts. We conceptualize court participation as shaped by the intersection of distinct spatio-temporal orders; what we term court spacetime and street spacetime, which structure institutional expectations and everyday survival in fundamentally different ways. Attending to these intersecting chronotopes illuminates how hybrid courts may reconfigure the conditions of participation without dislodging the underlying spatio-temporal logics of the court. First, we contextualize homelessness in Canada, criminal justice involvement, the digital divide, and scholarship on legal chronotopes. We then outline the study and methodology. Next, we apply a chronotopic analysis to examine how court spacetime and street spacetime collide in hybrid proceedings, and how outreach workers operate as chronotopic intermediaries who bridge spacetimes. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for access to justice and for reconceptualizing courts in the hybrid era.

Homelessness and criminal justice involvement

Homelessness refers to the situation where an individual or family lacks stable, permanent, appropriate housing or the immediate prospect, means, and ability to acquire it (Gaetz et al., 2017). Homelessness is not a new problem, however, the current homelessness crisis in Canada traces its origins to disinvestments in affordable housing throughout the 1980s, culminating in the federal disinvestment in social housing in 1993 (Clark, 2016). Simultaneously, globalization and structural economic shifts produced widespread job insecurity (Hulchanski, 2009). Similar trends appear across advanced welfare states, where neoliberal restructuring, labour market precarity, and retrenched social supports intensified housing insecurity (Benjaminsen, 2024). Governments have responded with national strategies (New Zealand Government, 2020), Housing First models (Benjaminsen, 2018), and integrated approaches linking housing, health, and justice (Szeintuch, 2024).

Despite interventions, homelessness in Canada continues to rise, with over 60,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night (Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, 2025). The population is increasingly diverse, including overrepresented youth, women, gender-diverse people, newcomers, 2SLGBTQAI + individuals, people with disabilities and Indigenous people, who account for one third of the unhoused population (Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, 2025). These patterns mirror international findings that marginalized populations disproportionately experience homelessness (Baptista and Marlier, 2019). Homelessness thus emerges from a complex interplay of structural, systemic and individual factors shaped by global and local conditions.

Unhoused people's interactions with the criminal justice system are diverse, shaped by structural vulnerabilities, social visibility and institutional biases. There is no universal experience of justice for unhoused individuals: while they are more likely than housed people to be victims of crime (Turner et al., 2018), they are also disproportionately subject to legal scrutiny and punitive measures due to the criminalization of public space (Walsh et al., 2025). Engaging in traditionally ‘private’ activities in a public area has social and legal repercussions, such as bylaws that target solicitation, public intoxication and public urination without adequate resources for basic hygiene practices (Walsh et al., 2025; Martino et al., 2024). This visibility has contributed to homelessness becoming highly political as these visual representations of ‘disorder’ are subject to NIMBYism (not in my backyard), gentrification and moral panic-based campaigns (Braimoh et al., 2023; Lundberg et al., 2025). For these reasons, homelessness becomes a pipeline into the criminal justice system, where poverty, visibility and displacement are punished rather than meaningfully addressed, creating a vicious cycle of criminalization (JHSO, 2024).

Criminal justice involvement spans various institutions, such as policing, the courts and corrections. This article centres on the criminal court process. As the site where laws are interpreted and applied, the courts serve as a critical point of access to (or exclusion from) justice. For unhoused people, systemic disadvantages are particularly evident at the bail stage, where situational factors, such as lacking a permanent address or surety, can lead to detainment or highly restrictive conditions (Yule et al., 2023). Access to legal representation poses another barrier, as chronic underfunding to legal aid and subsequent rigid eligibility criteria for service leave many unhoused individuals without counsel, shaping how they navigate charges, bail and sentencing (Nash et al., 2024). These barriers reveal that homelessness is not only a condition of housing precarity but a deeply legal and institutional problem.

The digital divide

Over the past 30 years, technology has become essential to daily life, shaping communication and extending social interaction into digital spaces. Limited access or literacy, however, excludes some individuals from education, employment and services. This type of exclusion is described as the digital divide, defined as the ‘gap between people who have adequate access to information communication technology (ICT) and people who have poor or no access to ICT’ (Lythreatis, Singh and El-Kassar, 2022, p. 1). Unhoused people are at the forefront of digital inequity, leaving them disadvantaged in virtual aspects of everyday life. While many unhoused people prioritize mobile devices as essential survival tools, the digital divide extends beyond ownership to the instability of access: devices are frequently lost, stolen, damaged, uncharged or disconnected, making sustained use difficult (Humphry et al., 2024).

Where private and continuous access to digital technologies is unavailable, public institutions such as libraries serve as critical low-barrier access points (Dowdell, 2019). Yet access is uneven: libraries may lack privacy, impose service bans, or expose unhoused people to stigma (Garner, 2023), and in rural or remote areas, they may be distant or scarce (Reid and Howard, 2016). However, access is increasingly important as services shift online. Humphry (2019) observes that while online platforms are rationalized as improving efficiency, they transfer the burden to individual users, increasing data costs and requiring self-management of services previously facilitated by staff. Digital self-service thus demands literacy, hardware, stable internet and personal identifiers. Rather than streamlining access, these systems risk deepening inequities, creating consequences that extend beyond inconvenience: lost benefits, missed time-sensitive communications and penalties for non-compliance.

We see similar technological trends in criminal courts, where proceedings have increasingly moved to virtual platforms. Even before COVID-19, expanding communication technologies had fostered what has been termed ‘digital justice’, driven largely by efficiency and cost-saving imperatives (Donoghue, 2017; McKay, 2020). Early tools included electronic filing, online disclosure hubs, digital evidence presentation and video appearances from custody (McKay, 2015; Rossner et al., 2021). Countries with prior technological integration adapted more easily to pandemic restrictions, whereas Canadian courts were largely unprepared for a system-wide shift (Haigh and Preston, 2020). The pandemic accelerated the adoption of videoconferencing, later Zoom, for nearly all criminal proceedings (Government of Canada, 2021). While some processes have returned to in-person formats, hybrid courts remain common. Framed as modernizing access to justice, these developments put into question who can meaningfully engage in digitally mediated processes, particularly those affected by the digital divide.

Space and time in legal context

The literature on space and the law is rich. Wacquant (2007, 2014) details the nexus of space, class and race, showing how urban territories are imbued with carceral logics that surveil and displace marginalized populations. Building on this, legal geographers argue that law actively produces space, regulating access, movement and visibility to reinforce social hierarchies (Buccieri, 2014). For instance, policing practices and exclusionary bylaws render marginalized groups hyper-visible in urban spaces, intensifying legal interventions and marking certain populations as ‘out of place’ (Brown, 2019). While much of this work focuses on law's operation across urban space, scholars have also examined how these dynamics materialize within legal institutions. Research on courthouses show that physical layout and location can create tangible barriers to access. Kärrholm and Löfgren (2025) found that Swedish courthouses are layered and segregated, with public entrances less visible and foyers indistinguishable from restricted areas, while Branco (2016) notes that downsizing the number of courthouses in Portugal forces residents to travel up to 50 km to attend court. These studies illustrate that spatial arrangements actively shape what is visible, who can move freely, and who can access legal institutions, creating material and symbolic barriers that constrain participation in the justice system.

Temporal dimensions exist in parallel with spatial rationality, as law actively produces and structures time. Legal temporalities are shaped by historical, cultural and political contexts, influencing both the interpretation and application of law (Friedman, 1969; Greenhouse, 1996). Courts, for instance, construct temporal narratives by assessing past actions through precedent and projecting future risks onto individuals (Chowdhury, 2020). Procedural practices such as scheduling, adjournments and remands further regulate daily interactions with the court system, privileging people aligned with normative temporal rhythms while disadvantaging others (Clarke and Metzler, 2025). Court delays, for example, can lead to extended pre-trial incarceration or prolonged, restrictive release conditions, disproportionately affecting individuals who lack the resources or stability to navigate lengthy proceedings (Varma, 2025). Socio-legal scholars argue that time is not neutral but a form of power/knowledge that organizes and governs conduct (Binkley, 2009), echoing Foucault's (1975) insight that ‘power is articulated directly onto time’ (p. 160). Courts embody this principle by embedding temporal hierarchies into their procedures, shaping the pace of justice.

Valverde's (2015) concept of legal chronotopes foregrounds the interplay of space and time, drawing on Bakhtin's literary notion. She argues that legal reasoning is always situated within particular spatio-temporal logics and cautions against analysing space or time in isolation, noting that a chronotopic approach ‘does not privilege either space or time, but focuses instead on their interaction, which enables analyses that are not based a priori’ (p. 26). In the courtroom, she explains that ‘the space of legal speech acts to draw boundaries around law's official time; and, in the same way, temporal markers (e.g. the judge's or clerk's pronouncement that the court is now in session) also redefines, instantly, the space in which the remark is made’ (p. 17). Courts, therefore, do not treat space and time as mere backdrops; they work together to structure legal processes.

Valverde suggests that examining these interactions can ‘shed light on the dynamics of what is called “justice”’ (p. 18), a task scholars have since pursued across court settings. For example, Ewing (2021) conceptualizes the High Court of Australia as a chronotope of the constitutional narrative, demonstrating how legal authority is mediated through architectural and spatial symbolism, highlighting tensions between the Court's design rhetoric and how the space is experienced. Similarly, Hartikainen (2025) applies a chronotopic lens to a Brazilian Supreme Court ruling on the criminalization of homo- and transphobic violence, illustrating how judicial decisions operate within specific spatio-temporal narratives that shape the recognition of rights and state responsibility. In a procedural context, Johannesson (2023) reveals how Swedish asylum and compulsory care hearings structure legal participation by regulating who can speak, when and under what conditions, prioritizing efficiency over dialogic engagement. Together, these studies demonstrate that chronotopic analysis can examine justice across multiple dimensions revealing how legal authority, participation and recognition are produced through the interaction of space and time.

We apply a chronotopic analysis to court participation for unhoused people in hybrid settings. Previous chronotopic studies have primarily examined the courts themselves, focusing on architecture, procedural temporalities, and the symbolic or institutional rhythms of judicial authority. By contrast, we fill a gap by comparing these institutional chronotopes with the spatio-temporal conditions under which unhoused people are expected to participate in court processes. Unlike conventional sociological analyses of access to justice, which often treat space and time as separate and descriptive conditions that shape access, a chronotopic approach treats spacetime as constitutive of justice itself. In other words, rather than treating delays, procedures or spatial arrangements as independent obstacles, a chronotopic lens highlights how legal authority, temporal rhythms, and spatial structures actively produce or constrain participation. Drawing on Kitchin and Dodge's (2014) insight that software shapes spatialities of everyday life, we extend this analysis to digital court environments, revealing how virtual courtrooms, despite lacking material walls, function as governed spaces with rules, gatekeepers and unequal conditions of entry. In this way, both physical and digital court spaces regulate not only where justice occurs, but also when and for whom participation is possible.

Current study

This study investigates access to justice for unhoused people amid the shift to virtual and hybrid criminal court proceedings; a change accelerated by the pandemic and now a permanent feature of the court system. To explore how hybrid court proceedings impact unhoused people navigating the criminal justice system, we conducted 18 in-depth, semi-structured key informant interviews with professionals who directly assist this population. The research was conducted in a mid-sized city in southern Ontario, Canada. We received approval from Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy's research ethics board in the spring of 2023. Initial recruitment took place through in-person outreach and snowball sampling (Etikan et al., 2016; Kirchherr and Charles, 2018), which leveraged professional networks to identify additional key informants.

The sample comprised three broad professional categories, all directly involved in assisting the homeless population to attend virtual and/or in-person court appearances: (1) court services officers (CSOs), (2) defence lawyers and paralegals and (3) outreach workers. During the pandemic, CSOs were assigned to assist members of the public with virtual court access from designated rooms in the courthouse. Lawyer/paralegal participants have first-hand experience assisting clients move their case through the criminal system, including attending court proceedings. Lastly, outreach workers are external to the courts and represented diverse professional backgrounds, including bail supervisors, library staff, an outreach nurse, a social worker and an outreach worker. While only some participants held the formal title of ‘outreach’, all engaged in outreach activities by supporting unhoused clients with practical needs, facilitating their court attendance and liaising with community-based services. The absence of interviews with individuals with lived experience of homelessness and the relatively small, purposive sample size are important limitations of this study. Nevertheless, participants occupied different professional roles and shared a unique, pandemic-specific experience of working in tandem to support unhoused clients’ court participation. This in-depth sample enables a detailed analysis of how court access is negotiated and constrained in hybrid settings.

Interviews followed a semi-structured format, informed by a thematically organized interview guide with open-ended questions. This approach encouraged participants to reflect on their specific expertise while maintaining coherence with the study's broader aims (Naz et al.,2022). The average interview length was 50 minutes. Most interviews (16) were conducted in person at locations such as the courthouse, coffee shops, libraries, or lawyers’ offices, and two were held virtually via Microsoft Teams. All interviews were conducted by the first author, digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim.

We analysed the data using a constructivist grounded approach (Charmaz, 2014), which emphasizes subjectivity and the researcher's role as a co-constructor of knowledge. We began with line-by-line coding of each transcript to create a preliminary codebook, then moved to focused coding, which synthesizes and conceptualizes larger data segments to advance theoretical insights (Charmaz, 2014). Combining open coding, research memos, engagement with theory and literature, and regular analysis meetings, we organized codes into broader themes. This analytic process yielded three central themes which advances the theory on legal chronotopes: (1) court spacetime in the hybrid era, (2) street spacetime and (3) outreach workers as chronotopic intermediaries. Each theme illustrates the ways that space and time intersect to shape participation in the court process and, we contend, reinforce the exclusion of unhoused people from access to justice.

Court spacetime in the hybrid era

Court proceedings operate within what we conceptualize as court spacetime: the institutional organization of legal participation through fixed schedules, regulated movement, and assumptions of spatial and temporal stability. While physical courtrooms have their own spatial and temporal structures (Valverde, 2016), the rise of hybrid court systems shifts these same dynamics onto digital spaces. The combination of space and time in court participation creates a distinctive spatio-temporal regime that can reinforce exclusion for unhoused people.

Courthouses are designed through the open court principle (Puddister and Small, 2019), where all proceedings must be accessible to the public. However, attending the courthouse is not always possible for individuals with disabilities, or people who struggle with mental health challenges, substance use, trauma, or structural inequities and oppression (Walsh et al., 2016). Joe, a bail supervisor, explained that he commonly supervises unhoused clients who ‘have traumatic histories or negative histories with law enforcement’, where mandatory security checks and the pervasive presence of officers make courthouse attendance intimidating. Further, during the pandemic, Matt, a defence lawyer, described confusion surrounding courthouse entry: ‘so many signs you couldn’t figure out what they said. And when you came to the front door because the way it's set up, it said don’t come in’. Those who did try to enter were often turned away or heavily questioned because ‘they didn’t know how to articulate what they were trying to do’ (Jessica, social worker). For unhoused individuals, barriers are further intensified by a lack of private space: they must either carry belongings into court (some of which may be prohibited) or leave them in unsecured locations, risking theft or loss (Blomley et al., 2022). Together, these experiences reveal a gap between the open court principle and the realities of courthouse access, where design and procedures can discourage, rather than facilitate entry.

Recognizing these obstacles, study participants emphasized the potential of virtual court to reduce some of the burdens associated with in-person attendance. Joe noted that virtual attendance ‘cuts down on having to get them [unhoused clients] here’, offering ‘more freedom to not have to come physically here’ for people who do not have access to transportation (Murphy, 2019). Jeff, a defence lawyer, agreed as he recounted a story of a client who accumulated 19 failure to appear charges because she ‘had a really serious form of social anxiety’ and likely would have benefited from the option to attend court virtually. Therefore, virtual attendance has the potential to reduce the stress and logistical challenges of physically appearing in court (Norton, 2022). Yet, growing reliance on digital platforms often fails to account for the complex needs of marginalized groups who already experience constrained spatio-temporal mobility. As physical and digital spaces become increasingly intertwined in the legal system, technological shifts may reconfigure, but not resolve, inequities already embedded within the justice system.

Through a chronotopic lens we can see how barriers to court are not only about physical presence or access to digital space, but also about when and for how long individuals can meaningfully participate. Unhoused people often lack stable technology, internet or private environments, constraining when, where and how they can participate. Participants described this reality:

Even if individuals do have cell phones, cell phones are hot commodities and they go missing, they often break as well because there is no capacity of protecting one's belongings to the same extent, so there can be water damage, they can be smashed, they can be broken, so it's difficult for community members to even hold on to a phone number. Even if they’re capable of consistently having phones, it's difficult to have that same phone for a long period of time. (Ian, library staff)

The unreliability of technology for unhoused people is a multifaceted challenge that extends beyond access. As Ian explained, even when people do have cell phones, they are difficult to keep over time. The lack of secure storage and protection from environmental hazards, such as rain or physical damage, means that phones frequently break or are stolen (Preece et al., 2020). Additionally, continual displacement (i.e. evictions and police sweeps), gives rise to lost possessions (Blomley et al., 2022). This instability demonstrates that access to a device at any given moment is a precarious state rather than a stable resource.

When unhoused people attend court virtually, it is often through a phone rather than a computer. However, when attending via phone, William, a bail supervisor, explained that ‘the quality is horrible. You can’t see, hear or understand anything that's really going on in the courtroom. They identify you by a phone number or by the name of your device that's calling in’. Attending court in this manner creates significant challenges to fully engaging with the proceedings. Poor audio and video quality can lead to misunderstandings, missed information or an inability to hear key parts of their case (McKay and Macintosh, 2024). There is also a risk of missing their turn when their phone number is called, since unhoused clients ‘change numbers all the time’ (Mike, defence lawyer), or use friends’ or public phones where the number is unknown to them.

The spaces unhoused people use to attend virtual court add another layer of spatio-temporal difficulty. Unlike the structured environment of a physical courtroom, many join proceedings from improvised or unsuitable locations. As Derek, a defence lawyer, explained, virtual hearings have ‘turned people's living rooms, people's cars, people's tents into mini courtrooms, even though they’re not designed and can’t accommodate that’. These settings offer little control over noise, interruptions or confidentiality, making it difficult to fully engage or share sensitive information. Outreach workers echoed these concerns, describing how they assist clients from ‘motels, encampments or in shelters’ (Ian, library worker). Yet even outreach centres that try to provide access often struggle to align with court schedules, setting people up in temporary, makeshift spaces like ‘the mop room’ or ‘in the storage closet’ (Leah, outreach worker). Barriers such as a lack of private, quiet and secure space that are available when hearings occur, highlight the challenges of virtual participation.

Unhoused people with access to a phone or computer still face barriers to participation, as access depends on having sufficient data or Wi-Fi at the required time. As Mike explained, most unhoused people ‘have cell phones that are on a pay as you go plan’. These types of plans can quickly run out of minutes and data. Court appearance times are fixed and often inflexible, with participants expected to be ready to join at a set hour and remain available until their matter is called. Limited access hours at public or shared internet locations exacerbate this rigidity, and even brief lapses in connectivity can result in missed appearances. As we discuss in the next section, these constraints illustrate how court spacetime exists in opposition with street spacetime, which is structured by organizational rules and hours of operation and the immediate demands of survival.

In an effort to improve access to court during the pandemic, outreach workers pushed for what we refer to as ‘band-aid solutions’: temporary interventions to mitigate systemic access issues. In collaboration with the outreach community, a local lawyer brought a Charter challenge, claiming that exclusively virtual appearances violated people's right to life, liberty and security of the person because ‘failure to appear’ charges were unconstitutional for people without access to technology. In response, the Crown attorney's office ‘negotiated a resolution whereby there was an office set up on the main floor, with a laptop’ (Brad, defence lawyer). However, this room still required in-person attendance at set times and was first-come first-served, often involving long waits before and during court. As such, this solution addressed one layer of inaccessibility, namely the digital aspect, but is still embedded within court spacetime, leaving other spatial and temporal demands of court participation firmly in place.

Another band-aid solution created during the pandemic and which has continued, is a local library programme that provides a computer specifically for people to access virtual court. However, this programme is ‘only allowed to run for two days a week for certain times’ (Jessica, social worker), creating temporal barriers for people accessing this service. While libraries are a major access point for individuals who require technology services (Adams and Krtalić, 2022), spatial barriers arise when unhoused people are excluded through no-trespass orders, either issued by the library ‘because of crises that have transpired within our space’ (Ian, library worker) or imposed by the court following a criminal charge (Sylvestre et al., 2017). The library programme illustrates how the interweaving of space and time (access restrictions, library hours and court schedules) structures participation in ways that limit unhoused peoples’ ability to engage with the court system.

These accounts illustrate how court participation is structured through court spacetime. Fixed courthouse locations, rigid schedules, and procedural waiting coincide with unstable access to technology, internet connectivity, and private space to produce distinctive forms of delay and uncertainty that shape how unhoused people experience court. Across both physical and digital settings, space and time are inseparable from how they co-structure the experience of participation, creating bottlenecks and stressors that reproduce inequities. As such, space and time re-produce one another, creating barriers to court participation that are more than the sum of their parts.

Street spacetime

For people experiencing homelessness, everyday life unfolds within what we conceptualize as street spacetime: a spatio-temporal order structured by uncertainty, mobility and the immediacy of survival. Within street spacetime, spatial and temporal considerations are oriented towards securing basic needs, such as shelter, food, healthcare, and safety, rather than long-term scheduling or advance planning (Van Doorn, 2010). Court spacetime, by contrast, is organized around fixed schedules, prolonged waiting, and assumptions of spatial and temporal stability. Engagement with the criminal court system therefore requires navigating a fundamentally different chronotope. Valverde (2012) notes that distinct chronotopes can coexist within the same urban space: the formal, rule-based logic of court spacetime operates alongside the embodied, situational logic of street spacetime.

The tension between court spacetime and street spacetime is apparent in the obligations imposed on accused people. Accused people are required to make, on average, 8.3 court appearances over approximately 6 months to resolve a charge (Haigh and Preston, 2020; Ontario Court of Justice, 2023). Pandemic backlogs intensified these burdens, with individuals sometimes waiting all day for an appearance only to have their matter deferred (Viglione et al., 2023). As Jeff, a defence lawyer, explained, ‘the day-to-day operation of a court has never been helpful to a person’. These requirements function as a form of ‘pre-punishment’ despite the presumption of innocence, and disrupt daily life, including employment and childcare arrangements (Ferguson, 2022).

While counsel can often appear on behalf of their clients, people without representation must attend every hearing themselves, increasing the burden of participation and the risk of missing a date. However, for unhoused people who do not know where they are going to sleep that night or how they will access other immediate needs, the amount of time it may take to appear in court is overshadowed by the time needed to survive day-to-day. Missed court appearances can create the impression that individuals are disorganized and fail to meet obligations. As one defence lawyer noted:

They [unhoused people] have nocturnal habits which means they’re not up in time, they may not have any level of organization in their life to facilitate them getting to somewhere at a particular time and place. These are probably the same people who miss probation appointments, doctor appointments, and have difficulty with all types of appointments. (Joan, defence lawyer)

Joan's framing attributes missed appearances to individual ‘habits’, portraying unhoused people as disorganized or inherently ‘nocturnal’. This characterization risks dehumanizing people by pathologizing their routines, while overlooking the structural and survival-based reasons why their time does not align with court schedules. Other participants pushed back against this view, emphasizing that the difficulty of waiting for hours is not about irresponsibility; rather, it reflects the realities of survival. From this perspective, the time demands of court are weighed against the urgent need to secure shelter, food or manage substance withdrawal. As William, a bail supervisor, explained:

When you are homeless, when you are in the throes of addiction, your priorities are not getting sick. Where am I going to sleep tonight? Anything else immediately in your face. They’re so focused on their basic need in that moment. So much so that the thought about not going to court, the thought about getting a bench warrant and possibility about getting arrested, that would be a very high motivator for you and I but for somebody who's in survival mode and doesn’t want to be writhing in the pains of withdrawal, that's their focus. (William, bail supervisor)

William described how a person's priority when struggling with addiction, is homed in on not going through withdrawal. Withdrawal can involve intense physical pain, nausea, sweating and anxiety (Donroe et al., 2016), all of which can make sitting in court intolerable. These temporal challenges exist whether court appearances are in-person or virtual. In fact, virtual court may intensify these difficulties as unhoused people often attend from unstable, distracting or unsafe spaces, where competing survival demands are ever-present. From this perspective, the inability to wait in court for hours highlights a fundamental tension between people's spatio-temporal realities (street spacetime) and with the demands of court spacetime.

Dej (2020) discusses the role of time and space in the lives of people experiencing homelessness, comparing characteristics of the emergency shelter system to traditional total institutions. She articulates that in most shelters there is a ‘strict regulation of space; the regimentation of time; and the demarcation of power between staff and residents’ (p. 81). We argue that court appearances operate similarly, where individuals must attend spatially (physically or virtually) and adhere to temporal requirements (attend on certain days and times), reinforcing power dynamics that subjugate unhoused peoples’ lived realities. These regimented demands extend beyond court. Joe, a bail supervisor, explained that community supervision requires appointments ‘on the same day and time’ each week, while shelters often require people to line up early for limited beds (Cooper, 2015), enforce evening curfews (Dej, 2020), or organize daily life around meals and check-in times (Gaetz and Buccieri, 2016). As Buccieri (2014) argues, such conditions keep unhoused people ‘firmly rooted in place and endlessly agency-bound’ (p. 132). Whether at court, shelters, soup kitchens or medical appointments, unhoused people must continually organize themselves around regimented spatio-temporal demands. In this way, the court functions as yet another regimented institution but one with punitive repercussions, mirroring the shelter system and imposing spatio-temporal conditions that frequently conflict with the rhythms of survival.

These dynamics are further illustrated in the day-to-day operation of the courtroom itself. As Shawn, a CSO, explained, there is an ‘informal’ order of calling the list where ‘at 9am those with lawyers and so on go first’, and unrepresented individuals are commonly not called until 11 to 11:30. Yet, all individuals are required to be present when court commences, rendering the experience of waiting in court a legal-temporal condition (De Genova, 2019). However, Mandy, an outreach nurse, found that ‘when they [the court] started opening up in hybrid [format], if you came in person to court, you would be prioritized as being seen over the people on Zoom’. As such, the reduction in the number of people attending the courthouse physically allows those in person to be more visible and thus, prioritized over others attending virtually. While this sometimes shortens the process, it does not address the corresponding spatial barriers unhoused people experience when entering the courthouse. Those appearing virtually and unrepresented wait the longest, while those able to attend in person face obstacles just to get through the courthouse doors.

In navigating these demands, participants described how clients are placed in impossible situations. Leah, shared one of these occasions,

‘Court is overlapping with my doctor's appointment and I’m not going be able to see the doctor again in the next 8 months’. So now I have to choose between if I keep sitting here on Zoom and maybe don’t get seen today versus going to see the doctor. So, it's talking through those moments and there being no good answer. I can only ever support you in what you’re going to do. I can’t tell you what to do in this moment because both of these options suck and just trying to figure it out. (Leah, outreach worker)

Leah's account vividly illustrates the structural tension between court spacetime and street spacetime: the rigid schedules and procedural demands of court directly collide with the urgent, survival-driven rhythms of daily life for unhoused people. These force impossible trade-offs between legal obligations and essential needs, reflecting a long-standing pattern of limited-service availability for people experiencing homelessness. Unhoused individuals already face compromised health that exacerbate vulnerability and restrict access to adequate care (Gaetz and Buccieri, 2016). Missing an opioid agonist treatment dose like methadone or suboxone, or a scheduled medical appointment that may not be available again for months, can have devastating consequences.

Street spacetime shows that spatial and temporal constraints are mutually constitutive: frequent movement, unstable environments and uncertain access to basic needs is intimately connected with the temporal rhythms of daily survival. When these survival-driven patterns collide with the fixed locations, schedules and procedures of court spacetime, the entanglement produces profound structural tension. Unhoused people must navigate two chronotopes, creating challenges for timely and consistent court participation that reflect the pressures of these intertwined spatio-temporal rhythms.

Outreach workers as chronotopic intermediaries

Outreach workers are directly engaged with supporting unhoused people to navigate the spatio-temporal tensions described above. Rather than waiting for clients to seek out services, they meet people where they are (Jiao et al., 2022), building strong relationships that enable them to assist with criminal matters such as applying for legal aid, contacting lawyers and facilitating virtual court appearances. In this context, outreach workers are chronotopic intermediaries: actors who bridge the spatial and temporal disjuncture between institutional demands and unhoused people's lived realities. They operate within and between chronotopes, temporarily reconciling the rigid schedules, locations and procedures of court spacetime with the unpredictable, contingent rhythms of street spacetime. They intervene at the intersection of court and street spacetime, reshaping the spatio-temporal conditions of participation by creating temporary solutions within an otherwise rigid system.

Outreach workers draw on their spatial and relational expertise to overcome digital and logistical barriers, ensuring unhoused people can engage with legal services. As Leah, an outreach worker, noted, she is the ‘go between the community who couldn’t access the technology and their legal aid’. Central to this role is locating clients, a task that can be time-consuming and challenging. Jessica, a social worker who works for an outreach programme, described how these relationships guide her daily work:

It's very relational… It's based on the relationships I have so I typically know where people are. Are they at tent city? Are they at an encampment? Are they at a soup kitchen? I typically try to know where people are at and through relationship, we know that. Then I would go find them in the community; it's not always easy. Sometimes the big part of my morning is finding people and then getting them to court. (Jessica, social worker)

This relational expertise enables outreach workers to traverse and reconcile the spatio-temporal logics of court and street demands by themselves occupying a significant amount of time (‘a big part of my morning’) and space (‘in the community’). In doing so, Jessica assumes the role of intermediary, managing both community and institutional spaces, coordinating time and place to make court participation possible for her clients. Outreach workers play a critical role in the execution of court processes, for lawyers to make contact with their clients, for court personnel to move along their case, and for the unhoused people to attend court and avoid failure to appear charges.

Lee and Donaldson (2018) note that fostering trusting relationships between outreach workers and people who are homeless is a crucial ‘first step toward addressing other long-term needs such as housing or employment’ (p. 426). Navigating this highly fractured spacetime requires specialized awareness of street spacetime. Workers such as Jessica are instrumental in bridging these spatio-temporal challenges by leveraging their knowledge of local services, routines and relationships to locate clients and support their court attendance. In some cases, lawyers expressed how their willingness to appear on behalf of clients depends on outreach workers’ ability to locate and support them. When asked about representing unhoused clients, one lawyer explained:

It depends on whether I think I can find them. So, if they have good supports like [local outreach program], a worker, then I’m more comfortable appearing for them. (Jeff, defence lawyer)

This description highlights how outreach workers’ relational expertise facilitates physical presence in court and shapes legal strategies and representation decisions. However, Matt, another defence lawyer, qualified this by noting that ‘we’re small enough of a city fortunately that we can still do that’, highlighting how geographic scale and community size can impact the ability to maintain these connections.

For people lucky enough to be able to access a pro bono lawyer or obtain legal aid, outreach workers can facilitate ongoing communication between clients and their lawyers. As Leah explained:

Their lawyers know that I can find them and I have a phone. I get texts like ‘hey, have you seen so and so? They have a court date coming up’ or ‘hey, can you help so and so get their fingerprints done?’ or ‘hey I’m going to appear on their behalf, can you let them know they don’t have to go’. (Leah, outreach worker)

By providing reliable contact and access to communication, outreach workers ensure clients can receive case-specific updates and support, underscoring their indispensable role as intermediaries between the court system and unhoused people.

Supporting unhoused clients’ court involvement often requires outreach workers extend beyond their formal roles, engaging in improvised problem-solving under seemingly impossible conditions. Mandy, an outreach nurse, notes that for her clients to access court in some cases ‘the only option would be for the person to use my phone’. Using outreach workers’ personal phones create issues around privacy when workers ‘can’t leave the person alone with my cell phone and go somewhere else’ (Mandy, outreach nurse). These improvised acts highlight a core contradiction in the virtual court landscape: while digital courtrooms have the potential to be more accessible or efficient than physical spaces, they are built upon assumptions about participants’ spatio-temporal stability.

During the pandemic, legal professionals were frequently required to work against these assumptions, engaging in digital improvisation by appearing in virtual court from bedrooms, shared living spaces, or while managing childcare (Flower, 2025). As Jenoff (2023) observes, ‘law practice is now a hybrid world’ (p. 36). However, for legal professionals these improvisations were buffered from sanction through professional authority and resource access. By contrast, for people experiencing homelessness, the absence of such buffers means that the failure to meet normative chronotopic expectations results in missed appearances, warrants or further criminalization. In this context, outreach workers function as critical chronotopic intermediaries, translating institutional demands into improvised, contingent forms of access.

While workarounds offered by outreach workers can bridge access gaps, they risk reinforcing the illusion that digital justice is working as intended. As described above, virtual proceedings can be beneficial in mitigating obstacles to attending court in person. In fact, the majority of participants in this study were proponents for the hybrid court model. However, outreach workers qualified their position by explaining that offloading these new responsibilities to workers, with no increased organizational capacity or compensation does not address underlying issues, including the revolving door of homelessness and criminal justice involvement (JHSO, 2024). In our discussions about these added responsibilities, Ian, a library worker who also previously worked in outreach explained,

Thinking that frontline workers and outreach efforts can address gross oversights is ridiculous. And you know, as much as people are always willing to make it work and help one another out, there is no improving the model truthfully if we don’t address this greater inequity within the criminal justice system. (Ian, library staff)

Ian points out that the outreach workers want to support people but they are working within a system where underlying injustices remain and where they are not trained or officially assigned roles around acting as a liaison between clients and the court. Meanwhile, outreach workers become over-worked, burnt out and consequently less effective at being able to provide support (Kerman et al., 2022). While many institutions were closed and professionals worked from home during the COVID-19 lockdowns, outreach workers occupied these otherwise empty spaces, assisting unhoused people during a time of crisis (Wynn and Stergiopoulos, 2021) and in doing so becoming marked as ‘vectors of infection’ (Chapados et al., 2023). Still, the demand on them to do more, in this case as it relates to assistance with court, persists.

Without the assistance of outreach workers, many unhoused people struggle to navigate the barriers to attending court. Ultimately, the system itself does not change; rather, advocates and support workers find short-term workarounds for a system that inherently does not work for unhoused people. Hybrid or digitally mediated processes may reconfigure participation, potentially expanding access in some ways, but because they remain situated within the temporal and spatial logics of court spacetime, they continue to generate tension for unhoused people whose everyday rhythms are structured by street spacetime. As described above, outreach workers act as chronotopic intermediaries: their work is not simply logistical, but involves navigating incompatible chronotopes and mediating between them, temporarily reconciling street and court spacetime to enable participation. Yet, while these interventions are essential, they also risk obscuring the structural inequities embedded in the system, giving the impression that access is possible without addressing the deeper spatio-temporal realities that constrain unhoused people's engagement with justice.

Conclusion

Courts, both physical and virtual, function as a legal chronotope with distinct spatial and temporal dimensions, which we refer to as court spacetime. Navigating and participating in court requires overcoming structural and procedural obstacles, such as fixed schedules, rigid locations and procedural pacing, that characterize this chronotope. For unhoused people, these challenges intersect with the rhythms of daily survival, or street spacetime, where time and space are organized around securing essentials like food, shelter, healthcare and safety. These divergent chronotopes force difficult trade-offs between attending court and meeting basic needs. Outreach workers play a crucial role as intermediaries in these tensions, engaging in improvised and relational labour to help clients participate in court. Yet, these efforts conceal how access to justice is being sustained through workarounds rather than institutional redesign.

By approaching access to justice through a chronotopic lens, this study moves beyond analyses that treat time and space as discrete barriers to participation. Instead, it foregrounds how legal institutions actively produce conditions of access by embedding assumptions about availability, stability and control into their design. Hybrid courts, in some cases, may expand the remit of access to justice by reducing travel demands, mitigating the anxiety associated with physical attendance, and increasing efficiency. However, because these processes remain anchored in court spacetime, their benefits are uneven and contingent, and they continue to generate tensions for individuals whose lives are organized according to fundamentally different spatio-temporal logics, namely street spacetime. Future research could extend this approach to examine how chronotopic conditions shape perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, as well as to identify institutional innovations that accommodate diverse spatio-temporal realities to promote more equitable participation in legal contexts.

This study is exploratory and based on the perspectives of professionals who support unhoused clients in navigating the court system. While their insights illuminate the complexity of access to justice, the absence of direct interviews with people experiencing homelessness is a significant limitation. Future research should centre the voices of unhoused people to fully capture the experience of hybrid court processes. Additionally, this study focused on criminal court processes, yet involvement in other forums, such as family court, civil proceedings, small claims and the landlord–tenant board hearings, can have equally significant, and at times devastating, impacts on vulnerably housed and unhoused populations. The emergence of virtual courtrooms creates a unique opportunity to fundamentally rethink legal participation and access to justice, an opportunity that, we suggest, remains largely unrealized. As hybrid practices expand across legal domains, their long-term implications for marginalized groups warrant sustained and critical attention.

Taken together, this analysis suggests that meaningful access to justice cannot be achieved through technological innovation alone. Without structural changes that address the underlying spatio-temporal organization of court participation, such as greater flexibility, recognition of competing survival demands, and institutional accountability for the labour currently absorbed by support workers, hybrid courts may reproduce, rather than resolve, long-standing inequities. These dynamics are not unique to homelessness, but extend to other marginalized groups, including people with disabilities, caregivers, precarious workers and people living in rural or remote communities. A chronotopic perspective makes visible how injustice persists by design through legal processes that continue to privilege particular ways of inhabiting time and space over others. In this sense, hybrid courts risk extending institutional reach without transforming the conditions of participation, becoming yet another layer of exclusion rather than a tool for meaningful access to justice.