8 PAGES The objective of this assignment is to enable
you to demonstrate your ability to develop a court management policy proposal
that addresses the key factors that should be considered to ensure that legal
requirements and best practices in management are observed. You will craft a
policy proposal designed to address problems of case backlog and excessive
delay in calendaring of hearings that have resulted from the growing
workload in state courts. You will select the U.S. state court system of your
choosing as opposed to a hypothetical or generic state court in an effort to
make this deliverable more realistic and to enable the use of information for
your research that may be available through actual court administration offices
(e.g., via their Web sites or publicly available research reports).
The environment in which this policy proposal is
being generated is one characterized by several realities:
·
State budgets for managing necessary services are shrinking.
·
The political environment is somewhat unstable because of lack of
consensus on how to address various types of social problems, including crime.
·
Property-related crime is on the rise, including collateral
offenses against persons.
·
Court systems are so overwhelmed that there is growing public
perception that public access to timely dispute resolution has become severely
constrained.
·
Correctional facilities are over-crowded, and problems of
recidivism have accelerated.
·
Plea bargaining and out-of court settlement of cases has increased
in part as a way to side-step lengthy and expensive court trials.
·
Certain alternative dispute resolution programs have been
operating successfully in many circumstances and jurisdictions.
You will produce a policy proposal from the
perspective that you are a senior policy analyst employed by a state’s
Administrative Office of the Courts. In this role as a senior policy analyst,
you have been assigned to draft a proposal for the court administrator
recommending viable options based on the legislature’s interests and objectives.
The background information that you have been given by your employer is that
the Judicial Committee of the State Legislature is very interested in a policy
proposal that weighs options for new programs and/or approaches to dispute
resolution designed to satisfy the legislature’s stated objectives to do the
following:
·
Reduce case backlog
·
Shorten the average time for court hearings to be calendared and
for decisions to be rendered
·
Avoid the expense of expanding the number of court houses, judges,
and associated court staff and/or detention facilities and associated staff
·
Minimize the need for funding of new programs
·
Consider the viability of “community burden-sharing” through
partnerships with private (where private includes both profit and nonprofit)
organizations and resources
In addition, the judicial committee has
specified that it would like to look at a policy proposal that focuses on
dispute resolution options related to juvenile offenders that address the
legislature’s objectives as a “pilot test” of new approaches to managing
court-related services in the existing environment. Thus, the court
administrator has asked that the policy proposal be narrowly focused on the
juvenile justice division of the state court system.
The policy proposal should exclude
considerations of whether any proposed new programs or expansions of existing
programs meet existing statutory requirements. For purposes of this project,
you are to assume that once the proposal is presented to the Judicial Committee
of the State Legislature, that committee will charge the Office of Legislative
General Counsel to determine what, if any, statutory changes would be
necessary.
Questions the proposal would need to address
include the following:
·
Would it cost the state less to implement a victim offender
mediation (VOM) program for juvenile offenders than it would to expand the
courts and corrections staff and facility infrastructure?
·
Would it take the state less time to implement a program such as
this than it would to expand the courts and corrections staff and facility
infrastructure?
·
To what extent could a VOM program reduce court case backlog and
thereby shorten the average time between arrest and case disposition?
·
What is the “track record” of one or more comparable VOM
program(s)?
·
What are the social benefits and social costs of a VOM program for
juvenile offenders both to the offenders themselves and to the larger
community?
·
Are there particular types of cases that are appropriate, as opposed
to others that the legislature might want to exclude?
·
What are the major challenges that will be faced by the
Administrative Office of the Courts in implementing this proposed policy in
terms of the following:
oProgram
development
oTraining and credentialing
of mediators
o“Selling” it to
potentially supportive community resources that could become partners with the
state in this effort
oCase flow and
records management
oSecurity issues
related to cases being mediated outside of court facilities
MUST HAVE 6 REFERENCES MUST BE IN APA FORMAT