Category: News

Chatbots in the Criminal Justice System: An Overview of Chatbots and Their Underlying Technologies and Applications

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported the Criminal Justice Testing and Evaluation Consortium has released a technology brief to help us better understand the use of chatbots in criminal justice. (Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users.) Five major takeaways include…

1. Chatbots have the potential to improve efficiency, reduce costs and workloads, expand capabilities, and aid users across many criminal justice use cases; however, capturing these gains requires forethought and may require significant investment and time. 

2. Stakeholders should consider the economic, operational, legal, safety, and privacy implications of implementing chatbots. 

3. Despite advances in AI, deploying AI-driven chatbots is not a “plug-and-play” opportunity for criminal justice applications; access to high-quality data for training the chatbot is critical for success. 

4. Chatbots have the potential to reduce administrative burden by freeing up staff to work on higher value tasks; however, the organization needs to consider how it will ensure human oversight of the chatbot to mitigate any potential risks. 

5. The continuous advancement of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) will expand chatbot use cases and applications in the criminal justice system. 

For more information and to download the full report, please visit: Chatbots in the Criminal Justice System (cjtec.org)

Putting Children and Families First in Dependency Case Management and Scheduling

The National Center for State Courts (NCSC), in partnership with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), funded by State Justice Institute, synthesized best practices in juvenile and family court and case management principles to develop an adaptable and responsive online training curriculum. The curriculum helps courts assess their adherence to principles of case management and scheduling and investigate research-supported strategies for increasing effective case management in dependency cases.

For more information and to access the case management curriculum, please visit: https://www.ncsc.org/services-and-experts/areas-of-expertise/children-and-families/caseflow-management-curriculum.

State of the State Courts 2021 Poll Results

Should remote hearings stay, or go? Results from the National Center for State Courts (NCSC)’s recent annual survey of public opinion finds that a majority of respondents believe that courts should continue to conduct remote hearings. Results show that majority of respondents believe courts should continue to hold hearings by video because it allows them to hear more cases and resolve cases more quickly, and it makes it easier for people to participate without having to travel to a courthouse, take time off work and find childcare.

This year’s survey also finds that large numbers of respondents indicate that barriers to getting to a physical courthouse exist, including a remarkable 49 percent who indicated that the distance they would need to travel to reach their courthouse would be a problem for them.

To read the full article, please visit State of the State Courts | NCSC.

Join the National Judicial Network

The National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project (NIWAP), working in partnership with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) on a State Justice Institute (SJI) funded project is pleased to invite you to participate in the National Judicial Network: Forum on Human Trafficking and Immigration in State Courts (“The Network”). The Network is seeking judges, commissioners, magistrates, Tribal judges, and other judicial officers to join the National Judicial Network, a peer to peer forum. The Network will provide a forum for judges to engage in peer-to-peer learning sessions with judges from across the country, participate in webinars, communicate with other judges in a member-only confidential Slack/Listserv, access topic-specific publications, and attend future in-person trainings on issues that arise in state courts involving human trafficking and immigrant victims.

For more information please visit: https://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/wp-content/uploads/NJN-Outreach-Letter-06.15.21.pdf and https://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/pubs/njn-outreach-flyer

Nine Rural Innovation Sites Selected

Nine of the country’s most innovative rural justice programs have been selected to serve as models for other communities as part of the Rural Justice Collaborative (RJC) Initiative. This initiative – a project of NCSC, Rulo Strategies and funded by State Justice Institute – will work with these sites to create educational materials for an online resource center and provide training opportunities.

The Nine (9) Innovation Sites selected include:
* South Carolina Victim Assistance Network Reaching Rural Initiative
* Lazarus Recovery Services in North Carolina
* The Center for Empowering Victims of Gender-Based Violence in Kansas
* The Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota
* The Rural Incubator Project for Lawyers in Montana
* Texas Dispute Resolution System: Rural Mediation
* Public Defender Corporation Recovery Coach Project in West Virginia
* Scott County Coordinated Community Response (CCR) Team in Tennessee
* Family Accountability and Recovery Court in North Carolina

For more information please visit: https://www.ruraljusticecollaborative.org/innovation-sites

Supporting Children in the Justice System

The Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, created the Child Victims and Witnesses Support Materials. For children, participating in the justice system as a victim or witness can be especially confusing, distressing, and even re-traumatizing. Child Victims and Witnesses Support Materials was created to support children and youth during their involvement with the justice system as a victim or witness to a crime.

Transformation of Youth Justice Symposium

The Robert F. Kennedy National Resource Center for Juvenile Justice recently hosted the Transformation of Youth Justice Symposium, co-sponsored by SJI, and supplemental half-day Training Institutes. The three-day event, held in Nashville, Tennessee, emphasized the importance of peer-to-peer learning and collaboration, which included 25 workshops, 5 plenaries, and 6 Training Institutes, providing participants with research-based and evidence-informed practical reforms that can be replicated and applied within state and local jurisdictions.

Utah Regulatory Sandbox Project

The Utah Office of Legal Services Innovation, an office of the Utah Supreme Court recently made history as the first state to establish a regulatory sandbox, providing a space for lawyers and other professionals to deliver nontraditional legal services under the supervision of the state supreme court. 

Additionally, this project is being evaluated through the development of a set of practical tools to facilitate an empirical and risk-based regulatory framework for legal services, including a regulatory management system, creation of a best practices handbook, and creation of a lessons learned monograph on the Utah model for legal services regulation.

Mental Health Competency Hearings Need Reform

About 4 out of 10 people in custody have been diagnosed with a mental illness. At some point, they ended up in court, where a judge determined whether they were competent to stand trial. While they waited for their competency hearings, they often languished in jails. In Texas alone, more than 1,500 people are waiting for a competency determination, and one out of seven of those defendants were charged only with a misdemeanor crime.

This nationwide problem – a crisis, according to mental health advocates – is decades old, but it’s getting renewed attention from state court leaders.
This month, the executive committee for the National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness approved a new report that examines mental health competency systems nationwide.

“The crisis in the competency system is the canary in the coal mine for the crisis at the intersection of our behavioral health and criminal justice systems,” said Oregon District Court Judge Nan Waller, a task force member. “Too many mentally ill people end up in the criminal justice system for lack of other options and are then funneled through the clogged competency process.”
Mental health experts and court leaders say the courts need to follow the report’s 10 recommendations:

  • Divert cases from the criminal justice system.
  • Restrict which cases are referred for competency evaluations.
  • Develop clinically appropriate evaluation sites.
  • Find treatment sites that go beyond psychiatric hospitals.
  • Revise restoration protocols.
  • Impose rational timelines for the competency process.
  • Address operational inefficiencies.
  • Address training, recruitment and retention of staff.
  • Coordinate and use data.
  • Develop robust community-based treatment and support for diversion and re-entry.

“The solutions,” Judge Waller said, “require increasing community mental health supports and services, developing points of defection and diversion from the criminal justice system and streamlining the competency process.”

The report from National Center for State Courts (NCSC) is intended to be an immediate resource for state court leaders, and it will serve as a framework as the task force develops additional tools for courts and their partners and forwards future recommendations to the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators.