What Went Wrong? - A New Court Metric?

Many years and many, many pounds ago I was a competitive distance runner.  I always thought this was good training for work with courts because one can practice for years and only maybe achieve a good result.  I still generally follow training ideas and athletics (running) as a sport.  One of those coach/writers is the excellently named Greg McMillan who writes a blog at https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/. 

Last week he posted an article on how an athlete should analyze a poor performance by creating a “what went wrong log” which has a simple spreadsheet structure.  Taking this general concept, I very much like the idea of studying “what went wrong” for the courts.  Let me explain.

---

Court statistics most often focus on how the “case processing factory” did their job.  How many, how fast, how many are in the queue (pending) and possibly a count of cases in broad/general categories.  With better Case and Document management systems we can now collect, capture, and study the case outcomes created by the court. 

But what about later?  Isn’t the point of a court’s decision reflected in an order or criminal sentence to benefit the person, group, and society?  It seems that like medical cancer statistics, we should be looking at the results of the court’s decisions not immediately counting the case as completed but also three and five years after the case ends?  In other words, what went wrong with the decision and more hopefully, what went right? 

This is where Coach Greg McMillan’s idea can possibly be applied?  We can survey, call, and examine later arrest and court case records to see if the original case decision helped or hurt the situation.  We can collect both the anecdotal descriptions but also grade what happened.  Why do that?  In the running example, it is to improve and have a better/faster result.  In the court’s example, it is to adjust policy or use programs and approaches that have a better-proven outcome.

One does not need to wait to do this kind of analysis project.  One can select cases from three or five years in the past and do the surveys.  With summer intern season coming up, I believe that it is worth a thought?