Paul Hammel
LINCOLN — The chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court used an annual speech Thursday to highlight a shortage of problem-solving courts and juvenile detention centers, and an outdated case management system “held together with baling wire and bubble gum.”
Chief Justice Mike Heavican, in his annual “State of the Judiciary” address to state lawmakers, said that despite an increase in drug courts and other problem-solving courts, a survey indicated that only 5% of eligible accused offenders are being served.
Nebraska now has 33 problem-solving courts in every judicial district in the state, which served almost 1,600 individuals during the last fiscal year. Participation has expanded 27% since 2020, but the judge says the state could do more for what is a “viable” and lower-cost alternative to incarceration.
The ‘taxpayers’ friend’
The cost of the intense supervision in a drug court is about $4,400 a year, Heavican said, compared to $41,000 for the yearly cost of imprisonment.
“Like probation, each problem-solving court is the taxpayers’ friend,” the judge said.
A year under probation supervision costs about $3,500, Heavican said.
One success story he pointed out was in Douglas County, where an “employment coordinator” was hired to help find jobs for juveniles participating in a “Youth Adult Problem Solving Court.”
The move decreased unemployment among participants by 13%, Heavican said, and prompted one court graduate to write a note of thanks for giving “young people like myself the chance to do something better.”
No juvenile detention centers west of Lincoln
Because of a post-pandemic increase in delinquency filings, the number of juveniles placed on probation rose 25% during the fiscal year that ended in July, he said.
Yet, the judge added, the state has only four juvenile detention centers, and they are located in the eastern Nebraska counties of Sarpy, Douglas, Lancaster and Madison.
“There are no juvenile detention facilities west of this building, and counties have no incentive to fund them,” Heavican said at the State Capitol.
Because of that, he added, Nebraska pays Iowa, Kansas, and Wyoming for juvenile detention.
Another issue, he said, is an outdated, in-house-produced judicial case management system that was launched in 1993 using COBAL programming code and an AS400 operating system.
‘Baling wire and bubble gum’
“The system is held together with baling wire and bubble gum,” Heavican told lawmakers, and needs to be replaced because of a growth in court services.
He added that it’s also a cybersecurity issue. Last year in Kansas, a foreign cyberattack shut down the state’s electronic management system for months, requiring a return to paper filing for a time and costing millions of dollars.
“Kansas serves as a warning for the rest of us,” Heavican said. “Without needed upgrades we must consider ourselves equally vulnerable.”