Roughly half of U.S. counties do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings, and few studies have documented the potential impacts of legal representation at this stage.
Providing defendants with legal counsel during their initial bail hearing decreases use of monetary bail and pretrial detention, without increasing the likelihood that defendants fail to appear at the subsequent preliminary hearing.
This guide supports the implementation of an empowerment-based domestic violence program within a family court setting. It was developed to share the best practices learned during an evaluation of the Safe Horizon Family Court organization.
In March 2018, the Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative convened an expert panel to identify priority needs and solutions for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the prosecutorial component of the criminal justice system.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, fiscal pressure on the states has led to corresponding pressure for court system retrenchment. In January 2015, the UCLA–RAND Center for Law and Public Policy held a conference to examine the depth of the resourcing problem and identify policy options and practical steps to mitigate the challenges.
Budget cuts at the state court level can mean courthouse closures, hiring freezes and layoffs, leading to longer wait times for the public. Educating the public about the role and importance of the state courts is key to preventing more budget cuts in the future.
Using information drawn from the report findings, this interactive tool for ranking court innovation needs allows users to re-prioritize the needs, based on their own views of the importance of different court system policy goals.
The court system needs to adapt to today's challenges and respond to new opportunities. Identifying high-priority needs provides a menu of innovation options for addressing key problems or capitalizing on emerging opportunities.
There are significant challenges to successfully using digital evidence in criminal prosecutions. Through structured interaction with police digital forensic experts, prosecuting attorneys, a privacy advocate, and industry representatives, researchers identified and prioritized specific needs to improve utilization of digital evidence in criminal justice.
This tool presents the prioritized needs related to digital evidence collection, management, analysis, and use and allows the user to see how their priorities would change when the importance of different digital evidence objectives are changed.
RAND Corporation researchers surveyed experts from five states that use a variety of approaches to funding state court systems to assess financing, accounting, and governance issues under various systems.
Some Bureau of Justice Assistance programs sustain operations or funding after initial funding ends. This report outlines strategies for helping programs sustain themselves and recommends a plan for ongoing measurement of sustainability.
Judicial salaries have a small but significant effect on the likelihood of exit and thus the length of judicial tenure, and a small effect on the background of judges that join the appellate bench.
A preliminary assessment of the impact of the financial crisis on the civil justice system finds that litigation demands on some parts of the system have increased, that funding for state courts may be trending downward, and that there have been disruptions in the legal services economy, in the provision of legal aid, and in the operation and staffing of courts.
This report presents a system of case weights for estimating the funding and staffing requirements of federal defender organizations, discusses factors that might influence defender time expenditures, and describes how such weights should be used.
Media Resources RAND Office of Media Relations (703) 413-1100, ext. 5117 (310) 451-6913 media@rand.org View the Study . FOR RELEASE Wednesday April 2, 2003 The system that resolves workers' compensation disputes in California is failing to provide the swift justice required by law and needs to be reformed, according ...
Severe problems of congestion and delay have existed in both criminal and civil courts throughout the country for many years. Only in the last few years, however, have the techniques of operations research been applied to the effective administratio...
