Elapsed times in criminal justice systems

An important determinant for the well-functioning of a criminal justice system is elapsed times. The elapsed time of a case is the period that is required to handle a case that pertains to a suspect or convict. Long elapsed times may be interpreted as delays in a criminal justice system, which in turn may lead to "justice delayed, justice denied". Such a development may undermine the public trust in the government. Therefore insight in elapsed time is of crucial importance for policy-makers to define a sound and healthy justice policy. To gain this insight, we propose a model to measure the elapsed time of criminal cases. The task of measuring elapsed times in the justice domain is not straightforward. Some challenges have to be taken into account before elapsed time can be measured. These include the type of case that is being processed, choosing the starting and finishing point of a criminal case, and integrating data pertaining to a criminal case from different sources. We propose a pragmatic approach to measuring elapsed times, which takes these challenges into account. As an example, we show how the elapsed times of criminal cases in the execution phase of the justice system can be calculated. This example also illustrates the effect of two different calculation methods on the measured elapsed times.