Identifying and Managing Juvenile Justice Delays

The only major research project on juvenile justice delay in the United States was completed nearly 10 years ago. To bring research up to date in this area, this project will review the methods currently used to control delay, including techniques developed for criminal and civil courts in the U.S. and from the international arena. Then it will identify a small group of juvenile courts known for their innovative methods of controlling delay and conduct telephone interviews with staff in each court. Site visits will be made to three jurisdictions in the mid-Atlantic region to assess their delay-reduction efforts in more detail. The study team will then analyze a large database of case records from the National Juvenile Court Data Archive- the same data source used for the 1996 study of juvenile court delay. The analysis will investigate delay patterns by size of jurisdiction, offender characteristics, and stage of legal process. The results will also be used to demonstrate effective methods of analyzing case processing data. Final reports will be prepared identifying appropriate data collection and analysis techniques to support delay-reduction efforts, as well as documents supporting policy issues about what works in controlling juvenile justice delays, and presentations of the project findings.