NCJ Number
147330
Date Published
1993
Length
96 pages
Annotation
This study examined differences in the performance of Public Prosecutor's Offices (PO's) in the Netherlands.
Abstract
In the Netherlands, the prosecutor can take a case to court, close it after some arrangement with the suspect outside the court (usually a fine or a warning) or refrain from action (using discretionary power). The primary administrative task of the Dutch PO's is the processing of police reports on offenses and misdemeanors. There were striking performance differences between the PO's. In 1990, the mean processing time for felonies ranged from 103 days to 271 days. The percentage of felony cases that ended with some kind of judicial intervention ranged from 51 percent to 78 percent. To determine the causes for these differences the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice began an investigation in 1991. Findings show that the performance of the PO's correlated with office size. The smaller the PO, the better the performance. An analysis revealed that the performance differences were not due to the characteristics of case workloads. This led to the testing of the hypothesis that performance differences might be explained by differences in the workload per PO employee. To test this hypothesis, the number of cases per employee completed in 1990 was calculated for each PO. There were relatively large differences between the PO's in the number of cases processed per employee. The study concludes that in large PO's there are more cases per employee than in small PO's. Also, the fewer the number of cases per employee, the better the performance. 14 tables, 6 figures, and 13 references