Judges

An unhurried hearing before an unhurried judge was originally thought to be an indispensable requirement for individualized justice in the juvenile court. In fact, a major part of the original rationale for creating specialized juvenile courts was the assumption that such courts would not be too burdened with work to respond promptly to individual needs in individual cases. Prompt response was desirable, not just because justice required it, but because it was an essential ingredient of effective intervention with children.

In practice, however, the resources available to juvenile courts have not always justified this assumption, as shown in an assessment performed 35 years ago of the world's first juvenile court, in Cook County, IL (National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1963). Consultant Edgar W. Brewer found that each Cook County juvenile case would, on average, require 1.5 hours of judicial time per year. Using this finding, and assuming the normal 220 judicial person-days per year and 6.5 hours per day of "bench time," Brewer concluded that a judge dedicated exclusively to hearing cases could handle 1,000 cases per year. Brewer then looked at official case dispositions for the Cook County juvenile court for the year 1961 (a total of 10,164) and concluded that the court needed 10 judges to do justice to that volume of cases; at the time, the court had only 5 judges.

Addressing resource issues requires information about workloads. What is the best means of determining a reasonable workload for the judiciary? There is no solid consensus on this question. The three dominant approaches, however, are the weighted caseload method, the Delphi method, and the normative method.

Weighted Caseload Method

Because court cases vary in complexity, the amount of time that judges and other court staff must spend to dispose of cases also varies. Uncontested juvenile traffic cases may require no judicial hearing time at all and only a limited amount of time for a cashier or clerk to receive and record a fine. Conversely, an aggravated felony in a State such as Texas—which makes provision for juvenile jury trials in such cases—could require a week or more of judicial hearing time; an equivalent amount of time from a bailiff, a court clerk, and a court reporter; and significant time from the judge's law clerk and secretary. A contested termination of parental rights case in Texas could take even longer—such cases involve more parties with legal standing than most juvenile cases and Texas law also provides for a jury trial in these matters. This variance in case complexity has generated considerable support for the use of weighted caseloads as a measurement tool.

In its most straightforward form, weighted caseload measurement involves attempting to determine the amount of judicial time needed for a "typical" case by taking the following steps:

• Identifying the events that occur in a particular case type.

• Documenting the frequency with which these events occur.

• Recording how much of a judge's time each event requires. (The total time spent, measured in minutes, becomes the case weight.)

Weighted caseload analysis begins by tracking the events that occur in given case types. In delinquency cases, such events will include, at a minimum, an arraignment and/or a detention hearing, an adjudication hearing, and a disposition hearing. If a juvenile is detained, some States require a detention hearing every 7 days for the duration of the pretrial detention. In dependency cases, there may be as many as 35 discrete case events. (Steelman, Rubin, and Arnold, 1993; Halemba, Hurst, and Gable, 1997).

Event frequency for particular types of cases is then established by reviewing case records. The time that a judge spends on each event in each case, including bench and nonbench time, is recorded in minutes. The sum of all these times becomes the case weight. The case weights are an average—derived by examining a sample of cases of a particular type—but are thought to represent the amount of time needed to process a typical case.

In a recent study, the State of Colorado documented a 69-minute case weight for juvenile cases. Using this case weight, a 220-day work year, and an average of 6.5 hours per day of available case-hearing time for urban judges, the study concluded that an urban judge should be able to hear 1,212 cases per year. This same study found that a rural juvenile court judge, with slightly less than 5 hours of available hearing time per day (because multicounty circuits in Colorado make it necessary for judges to travel an hour or more per day) should be able to hear 941 cases per year (Ostrom and Kauder, 1996).

In a 1993 study of courts in Cook County, IL, the National Center for State Courts determined case weights for specific types of juvenile court cases (Steelman, Rubin, and Arnold, 1993). The case weights were 299.74 minutes for dependency (child in custody) cases, 352.54 minutes for dependency (child in home) cases, 140.76 minutes for juvenile delinquency (child detained) cases, and 111.40 minutes for delinquency (child not detained) cases. These weights are grossly different from those developed for urban communities in Colorado, Michigan, and West Virginia using a similar method. There is no information available on the reasons for these variations, but the differences are most likely the result of different legal procedures and different case goals.

Delphi Method

The Delphi Research Method is one technique for arriving at "the truth" by sampling expert opinion. The technique has been used frequently as a source of external validation in weighted caseload studies but has seldom been used as a stand-alone process to determine the workload of the judiciary. The technique, however, is probably used far more frequently than can be documented, because most such studies are proprietary and difficult to access.

The State of Arkansas has had occasion to make extensive use of the Delphi technique. In 1988, following an Arkansas Supreme Court decision invalidating the State's existing court of juvenile jurisdiction as unconstitutional, Arkansas was called upon to establish an entirely new statewide juvenile court. The National Center for Juvenile Justice was retained to assist in estimating workload and determining staffing patterns for the new court. Since the existing juvenile court had been invalidated, its existing case records could not be used to determine the events necessary to initiate and dispose of juvenile cases. Consequently, the entire estimation process depended on the Delphi technique. Judges and their support staff were asked to identify the events required for case initiation, adjudication, disposition, and review and to estimate the time required to accomplish each event. Case weights based on these estimates were then applied to the caseload to determine the number of judges that would be needed to staff the statewide juvenile court. This procedure resulted in an estimate of 180 minutes, or 3 hours, of judicial time to handle a typical juvenile case from initiation through closure. Using a 6-hour case hearing day and a 220-day work year, Arkansas concluded that a judge could hear an average of 440 cases per year. The State used the results of the study to staff its new courts of juvenile jurisdiction and, from all accounts, participants have been quite satisfied with the results.

Normative Method

Another frequently used approach to measuring judicial workload involves comparative analysis across analogous jurisdictions. The jurisdictions must be similar in demographics and their courts comparable in jurisdiction and procedure. Once these parameters are established and the jurisdictions are selected, it is simply a matter of selecting a stable measure (such as eligible child population and/or annual case dispositions) and dividing this measure into the number of judges available. The result is usually expressed in a case rate of judicial officers per 1,000 eligible children or judicial officers per 1,000 cases.

The simplicity of the normative/workload comparison approach makes it appealing to those involved in the appropriations process, but the method's usefulness is widely questioned among researchers. The normative method can be easy to implement, and most jurisdictions already regularly collect the data it requires. Nevertheless, the prevailing skepticism among researchers is such that studies documenting the approach are difficult to find (National Center for Juvenile Justice, 1998). The skepticism stems from two sources. First, such studies assume that the norm is a worthy goal. That may not be the case when courts are chosen on the basis of demographics, because all of the courts may face similar resource limitations. Moreover, the temptation to choose demographically similar but more affluent and/or progressive jurisdictions is difficult to resist when it is essential to present a convincing message to appropriating bodies.

Defense Attorneys

In a national assessment of defense counsel for juveniles, high caseloads were found to be the single most important barrier to effective representation (Puritz et al., 1995). According to that study, attorneys with heavy caseload burdens find it difficult to provide many of the components of effective representation:

• Meet with young clients to explain the proceedings before the clients appear at their detention hearings.

• Investigate the circumstances of the alleged offenses.

• Learn about the youth's ties to their families and communities.

• Research and write individualized pretrial motions.

• Keep informed on community-based alternatives to secure detention.

• Develop dispositional plans that may be preferable to institutional confinement.

• Follow up with clients during dispositional reviews.

• Monitor placement problems that may arise regarding needed services or conditions of confinement.

Despite the practical importance of ensuring reasonable caseloads for defense attorneys in juvenile court, the literature addressing approaches to measuring and assessing defense attorneys' workload burdens is sparse to nonexistent. According to a caseload standard presented in Report on the Courts (National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, 1973), the "caseload of a public defender . . . should not exceed . . . more than two hundred . . . juvenile court cases per attorney per year." The Commission defined a case as a single charge or set of charges concerning a defendant in one court in one proceeding and cautioned that particular conditions, such as longer travel times, may dictate lower limits in some localities.

The Commission's report reveals little regarding the process by which the 200-case standard was derived. It is reasonable to assume that, as so often is the case in matters of jurisprudence, it reflects the "wisdom of the elders" or, in the language of social scientists, the preponderance of professional opinion. Nevertheless, even after 25 years, the standard is apparently still accepted by the legal profession as a useful guide in assessing the workload of court-appointed defense attorneys for juveniles (Puritz, 1995).

Probation Officers and Pretrial Services Personnel

A review of the literature suggests that probation professionals have been more concerned than most other juvenile justice professionals about the issue of caseload standards. The literature on the topic of caseload standards for probation officers is extensive and, by one account, dates to at least 1917, when a consensus of probation administrators is said to have established a probation caseload standard of 50 offenders per officer. That remained the accepted figure until 1967, when the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice lowered the ideal caseload to an average of 35 offenders per officer. Both of these numbers bore the stamp of "professional consensus": the National Probation Association, the American Correctional Association, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the U.S. Children's Bureau, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges all endorsed both the original 50-case standard and its successor, the 35-case standard.

To be sure, there was interest—especially from so-called operations researchers—in alternatives to professional consensus as an approach to measuring probation workloads. With the advent of automation, ambitious projects were undertaken in an attempt to simulate probation decisionmaking, in juvenile delinquency cases in particular. But the unitary standard remained the rule until the fiscal austerity of the late 1970's and early 1980's brought renewed urgency to the effort to "provide data for budget justification and support" (Bemus, Arling, and Quigley, 1983). At that time, efforts began in earnest to move from measures based on number of cases to measures based on units of work.

Classification Systems

Like weighted caseload measures for the judiciary, workload management and measurement efforts in probation have proceeded from the assumption that cases vary in their supervision requirements. Proceeding from such an assumption, case classification becomes necessary for probation workload measurement regardless of whether the ultimate goal is the economical use of probation personnel, improved outcomes for probationers, or both.

Over the past 20 years, the dominant approach to case classification in probation has been that of risk classification, wherein risk-scaling instruments are administered to classify an offending population's propensity for reoffending. Once reoffending probabilities have been established, differing levels of supervision are arbitrarily set. (Setting levels of supervision—deciding, for example, what probability of reoffending constitutes the threshold for incarceration—involves political decisions. Scientific research can only provide perspective for these decisions.) Ideally, these levels are then validated through research, to take the guesswork out of determining the level of supervision that an offender may require for optimum achievement of goals. This approach will generate unitary caseload measures for a given level of supervision but will not generate an average number of cases per probation officer. The alternative approach to classification, that of needs assessment or needs classification, is favored by practicing probation officers as a way to establish effective workload measures. Nevertheless, the needs-based approach to classification has been relatively neglected within the past 20 years. The main reason may be the lack of consensus regarding theories of human development, which has precluded agreement on a screening instrument for classifying need. Also, political necessity has dictated that risk-scaling instruments take precedence over needs-based approaches.

While classification systems for use in the supervision function of probation have proliferated, they have been of limited value in establishing standards relating to the intake and pretrial services functions of probation. Most juvenile probation departments in the United States do not have a unit identified as pretrial services. Many of the larger departments have intake departments, some have intake and investigation departments combined, and others have separate intake and investigation and/or predisposition study divisions. Often, these functions are statutorily mandated. They may have little or nothing to do with the risk of reoffending but much to do with the assurance of offender rights and the legal responsibilities of the probation agency. Consequently, the caseload approach is still preferred in developing workload measures for intake and predisposition study (Kurz et al., 1988).

In addition to intake screening, juvenile probation departments commonly perform other functions that do not lend themselves easily to risk classification (Kurz et al., 1988). These functions include diversion, presentation of cases in court as a specialization, representation of the interests of the probation department in pretrial negotiation processes between prosecuting and defense attorneys, out-of-State or out-of-county courtesy supervision, and placement unit and home detention supervision. More research is needed on workload measurement for these additional functions.