The difficulty of developing meaningful and broadly applicable workload standards should not be underestimated. An instructive illustration of the problems inherent in such an effort is provided in a recent study by the Criminal Justice Center of Minnesota Planning (Erickson et al., 1997). The study attempted to fulfill a legislative mandate to develop a weighted workload formula for use in distributing funding, with the aim of reducing probation officer caseloads statewide. The authors identified the following stumbling blocks:

• Current standards were lacking definitions, and statutes failed to provide them.

• Different probation agencies had different mission statements and goals.

• Wide variations in local community tolerance for crime caused comparable variations in the type of offenders received for probation services in different communities.

• There was no common risk assessment instrument in use, and no followup attempts had been made to validate the various classification instruments that were used.

• Many probation agencies feared that statewide standards would limit local autonomy, innovation, and creativity; ignore local differences; forfeit the advantages of pluralism and decentralization; and otherwise be less effective than locally generated standards.

The authors concluded that even if these and other barriers could be overcome, the data that would be needed to identify workload management methods and establish a validation process for assessment instruments did not exist. Establishing a process for collecting uniform data would take significant time and money, and even more resources would be needed to regulate, record, and compile the data.

While the foregoing study pertained only to probation, the limitations it suggests—the formidable documentation requirements, the differing community standards, and so on—apply to efforts to develop workload measures for the judiciary and defense counsel. It is, therefore, perhaps understandable that simplistic, generalized measures of caseload have been used and that no attempt has been made to perfect broadly applicable workload measures.