Web Report: The Pace of Processing Justice
Courts play a central role in local criminal legal systems, shaping the experiences and outcomes of people who face legal charges. Court operations—including how long it takes to process cases—directly affect whether individuals receive timely outcomes. Despite longstanding efforts to improve court efficiency, defendants in many American courts continue to experience significant case processing delays driven by multiple factors, chief among them an overburdened judicial system in which case volumes often exceed the capacity of available judges and court resources needed to process them efficiently.
Case processing delays have profound consequences for individuals awaiting trial, disposition, or sentencing—particularly for those detained in jail pretrial. Even short stays in pretrial detention can negatively affect employment, interfere with housing stability, strain family relationships, disrupt child custody, and increase the likelihood of pleading guilty. For individuals who remain in the community while awaiting trial or sentencing, lengthy legal proceedings can lead to pessimism, anxiety, and deteriorating mental health that worsens as case processing time increases. These consequences underscore the need to analyze and identify opportunities to reduce court case processing time without jeopardizing due process.
The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), launched in 2015 by the MacArthur Foundation to reduce the overuse of jail, provides a unique opportunity to examine case processing times in jurisdictions nationwide. The Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York (CUNY ISLG) serves as the lead data and analytic partner of the SJC. For nearly a decade, CUNY ISLG has collected comprehensive legal system data from participating jurisdictions, comprising thousands of detailed court data files and more than 175 million records across jurisdictions that represent 14 percent of the U.S. population.
The analysis includes data collected by CUNY ISLG to explore case processing time in 10 participating SJC jurisdictions between 2016-2024—the period for which data is available—with a focus on how case processing time changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in response to public health restrictions and reduced court operations.
In summary, this analysis finds that:
Case volume declined over the past decade.
During the analysis period, case filings and dispositions declined across the SJC, reaching all-time lows shortly after the onset of the pandemic. Within a year of the pandemic, filings and dispositions increased from these lows but still remained below pre-pandemic levels.
Despite lower case volume, case processing times increased substantially over the past decade for both felony and misdemeanor cases, with sharper and more persistent increases among misdemeanors.
Between 2016 and 2020, average case processing times for felony cases (267 to 305 days) and misdemeanor cases (195 to 244 days) across SJC cities and counties increased and were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching 442 days for felony cases and 399 days for misdemeanor cases, with delays continuing post-pandemic. As of 2024, average case processing time remains 55 percent and 75 percent above pre-pandemic levels for both felony (413 days) and misdemeanor cases (342 days), respectively.
3. SJC jurisdictions fall short of meeting model case processing time benchmarks—a trend also found across non-SJC counties.
SJC cities and counties performed well below case processing time benchmarks set by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), with almost no jurisdictions meeting NCSC time standards. The standards specify that 98 percent of misdemeanor cases should be resolved within 180 days and 98 percent of felony cases should be resolved within one year. As of early 2024, the average percentage of cases resolved within the time standards has improved to 54 percent for misdemeanor cases and 64 percent for felony cases but remains below pre-pandemic levels.
The findings of this analysis highlight the challenges associated with reducing court case processing time, particularly because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. While jurisdictions in the SJC have made progress towards reducing overall jail populations, increasing case processing times and an inability to meet national model time standards remain critical issues, especially for misdemeanor cases. Continued data transparency on case processing times can support efforts to identify, assess, and scale best practices for timely case resolution and is essential to address case processing delays and ensure fairness and efficiency in court systems. On our blog, report author Douglas Evans outlines some of the factors that affect processing—and what some SJC cities and counties are doing to fix it.
Future analyses using these data will explore case processing trends for individuals detained pretrial compared to those remaining in the community during their case pendency.
This web report lays out what we found from the analysis of ten SJC sites across the country.