NCJ Number
76096
Date Published
1980
Length
172 pages
Annotation
This study was undertaken to identify Utah police officers,' prosecutors,' and judges' criteria for evaluating each other's performance and to show how they could be used to measure the performance of each professional group.
Abstract
Information on key performance factors was gathered through a review of over 60 books and periodical articles on the subject of criminal justice measures and through interviews with 53 criminal justice administrators. As a result, 35 important measures of performance were selected for evaluating the critical aspects of police prosecutor and judicial services. The top three measures of police performance, in order of importance, are community support, amount of training, and morale. For prosecutors' work, they are case screening, amount of preparation, and conviction rates and guilty pleas; for judges, they are amount of judicial training, length of trials, and number of decisions upheld on appeal. Generally, each group had the same important measures for itself as the other two groups had for it, and most of the 35 measures designated as important were discussed in the available literature. However, some measures received little or no attention. For example, for the police these were physical condition and ability to testify in court; for prosecutors, length of case processing time and plea negotiations were ignored; and for judges, work hours, use of presentence reports, and judges' feedback to police and prosecutors were bypassed. Among the areas in which administrators most frequently mentioned that performance could be improved were training and evidence collection by police, preparation and availability for police by prosecutors, and consistency and avoidance of aloofness by judges. Further advice for improvements and the administrators' ratings of each other are discussed. Footnotes, data tables, and about 60 references are included. An appendix contains the survey instrument. (Author abstract modified)