Indicators of Need
There currently is no better indicator of need for juvenile court judges, defense counsel, probation officers, and pretrial service personnel than the court's eligible child population. The child population is the best and most stable basis for predicting levels of juvenile offending and child victimization (Sickmund et al., 1998). Because juvenile offenders and child victims make up the preponderance of the juvenile court workload, it seems reasonable to use eligible child population as the best general indicator of need for court personnel. Child population, however, is not a predictor of a community's tolerance for crime and victimization. Nor is it a predictor of law and procedure. Both of these variables have a significant impact on the workload and resource requirements of the justice system. In the future, a better indicator of need for juvenile court personnel may have to be developed.
A Template for Workload Measurement
A review of the literature makes it apparent that no unitary approach to caseload measurement or workload measurement is likely to emerge soon as the preferred method of documenting personnel requirements in juvenile justice. On the other hand, the literature supports the belief that it might be possible to develop a flexible, affordable template for measuring workload. In fact, pieces of that template already exist in the form of weighted caseload measures, risk classification, Delphi procedures, and needs assessment techniques.
Although these pieces exist, an important part of the total picture is missing. There are no practice templates available that include clearly articulated practice guidelines for conducting the total business of the juvenile court. The Resource Guidelines project, a recent OJJDP-funded research effort focused on the abuse/neglect-related activities of the juvenile court, could eventually serve as one approach to developing such a practice template for the entire range of the juvenile court jurisdiction. The procedures for dependency and delinquency cases are directly analogous.
The Resource Guidelines project was developed under the auspices of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and was endorsed by the Conference of Chief Justices of the United States and the American Bar Association. In the project's initial phases, the National Center for Juvenile Justice first documented the events required to achieve given performance standards in the management of abuse/neglect cases and then determined related workload requirements for judges, hearing officers, administrative support staff, protective service caseworkers, prosecutors, defense counsel, and guardians ad litem. The initial demonstration was conducted in Hamilton County, OH. Replication is now under way in 12 urban communities, and interest has been expressed by many others.
A workload measurement demonstration project building on the Resource Guidelines template—by incorporating the best approaches to calculating workloads for the entire range of the juvenile court jurisdiction—perhaps could serve as a crucible for forging a far better understanding of applied workload measurement. The Resource Guidelines project began by establishing clear procedural and temporal standards for case processing and then systematically documented the resources required to achieve these standards, which were chosen through professional consensus. Although the standards have no demonstrable relationship to long-range case outcomes, their efficacy in improving the efficiency of procedures and reducing case delay has been demonstrated in Pima County, AZ, and evaluations are currently being conducted in Hennepin County, MN, and Philadelphia, PA.
In the absence of such a comprehensive demonstration project, those seeking to become familiar with the current state of the art in juvenile court workload measurement may want to review the publications listed at the end of this Bulletin, especially Steelman, Rubin, and Arnold (1993); Halemba, Hurst, and Gable (1997); Kurz et al. (1988); and Cooper, Puritz, and Shang (1998).
