In 2018, a statewide effort to implement a new Superior Court case management system (SC-CMS) went live with all but 2 of the 39 Superior Courts. Additionally, the Courts of Limited Jurisdiction have begun a project to replace their case management system (CLJ-CMS). The Juvenile Courts are currently “out of scope” in both the SC-CMS and CLJ-CMS projects. As Superior Courts and County Clerk's offices around the State use the new Superior Court case management system, the Juvenile Departments continue to use the underperforming, inadequate, and outdated JCS application. There has been no concrete plan to retire or replace JCS at this time. The existing JCS application receives and shares limited information with the newer case management systems through integration efforts.

Due to the SC-CMS project priority and focus, the Juvenile Courts have not been able to utilize additional features in JCS until the integration work with JCS and the Superior Court case management systems (SC-CMS) is complete and successfully working. However, given that JCS is nearly 20 years old, the number of defects has increased significantly over the years with no resolution.

The approved JIS Strategic Direction for all JIS Applications is to modernize existing applications and move toward Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) applications whenever possible. The aging JCS application no longer provides all the functionality Juvenile Courts need requiring the need to address the future of JCS.

The Juvenile and Corrections System (JCS) currently offers juvenile courts statewide the ability to
manage referrals, and includes a limited amount of functionality to manage detention. However, the system lacks a supervision module. The current system lacks adequate reporting capabilities and relies
on superior court applications for person record creation and maintenance capabilities. As a result,
some juvenile courts have implemented their own case management systems and many have
separate local systems in use for managing the detention and probation components. This creates many issues as a consequence of using multiple systems with integrations across counties and courts statewide. This in turn creates a complex technical environment that leads to increased costs to maintain, support, and modernize.

The juvenile courts need an all-in-one, automated, and modern solution that supports the management of youths, referrals, detentions, supervision and assessments. This solution needs to be a tool that functions to drive and control the flow of work in accordance with important deadlines associated with youth management, referrals, detentions, supervision and assessment. It should not be simply a data repository, but rather a tool that allows for documents to be added to the referral/case to provide streamlined and easy access to these documents, and a robust reporting feature that duplicates the reports currently available. In addition, users of this new solution should be able to run reports at any time. This solution also needs to be secure to prevent unauthorized access to data and documents associated with the youths. The new solution should have the ability to ingest historical data from the current systems used by the juvenile courts.

The juvenile courts would like to pursue a technology solution(s) to:

• Search and modify existing statewide person records
• Create and maintain juvenile/youth person records
• Create, manage and track the following from initiation to disposition
• Referrals
• Detentions
• Criminal History
• Supervision
• Alerts and Notifications
• Assessments
• Securely manage highly sensitive data
• Reduce duplicate data entry and improve juvenile court and department productivity
• Give the juvenile court users a comprehensive view of juvenile/youth records, detention, assessment and supervision data
• Give juvenile court users and the AOC control of who has access to the system
• Send juvenile court data to the AOC Enterprise Data Repository
• Give the juvenile court users the ability to generate forms, letters and a variety of reports with
advanced tools
• Give the juvenile court users the ability to search for data quickly using many different search criteria
• Reduce the need for multiple technology solutions requiring local and AOC support teams

The implementation of a replacement for the Juvenile and Corrections System (JCS) will standardize the case management functions of all juvenile courts that choose to utilize this application and will allow for a streamlined and more efficient process for AOC to maintain, support, and update this system for juvenile courts. The functions that will be enhanced by this solution will pertain to the case management of youths, referrals, detentions, supervision, and assessments of juveniles.

Defining, selecting, and implementing a major system such as this would be a multi-year and multi-million-dollar investment. For a project of this size and complexity, an in-depth analysis and requirements documentation is necessary for due diligence and to gain a better understanding of associated costs and project risks. The Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) would begin this effort by gathering and documenting high-level business requirements from the juvenile courts. AOC would then solicit information from vendors to determine if systems exist in the market space to meet the requirements identified. AOC would also work closely with the courts to determine how many juvenile courts would be likely to adopt a new statewide solution. Finally, if approved by the Judicial Information System Committee (JISC), the AOC would either procure or build a solution based upon the results of this in-depth analysis and requirements documentation. The sizing below represents only the costs for the in-depth analysis and requirements documentation.

AOC would conduct an in-depth analysis and requirements documentation to determine the state of the market for potential solutions, determine the breadth of potential participation in a statewide system, and craft a plan to procure and implement a solution.

This ITG was prioritized as #6 by the JISC.