July 11, 2008

From the Benches and Trenches: Evaluating the Court Process for Alaska's Children in Need of Aid

The study describes the Alaska Court System's handling of child protection cases, compared that situation to findings from two earlier assessments, and discussed the court's performance in the context of applicable state and federal case-processing standards, including timelines, efficiency, fairness, treatment of parties, and quality of proceedings. The analysis suggested that the Alaska Court System is doing well on several performance measures, including fairness, respectful treatment of parties, and quality of proceedings, but that room for improvement exists on others, particularly timelines and efficiency. These general findings were complicated by significant variations on several measures among court locations and on some measures by survey results suggesting that practitioners and judges may not be dissatisfied with the system's current level of performance.