UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1256

Overall Research Project Description This project may go one of two ways:
(1) Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) is currently collecting data via a court observation study in Jackson, Mississippi to better understand differences in the city's two municipal courts. One court was the city’s original municipal court, and the other one is less than a year old, located in a more affluent area of the city. Municipal courts handle a wide range of hearings, from traffic tickets to misdemeanors to felonies. This is where the average citizen is most likely to come into contact with the criminal legal system. The original municipal court has relied largely on paper-based recordkeeping, which raises challenges for data analysis. The new municipal court has adopted electronic recordkeeping. NDS is working to compile comparable data for both courts. Because this effort involves significant person-hours to manually enter data from court dockets and to gather information from in-person court monitoring, NDS is seeking assistance from Pro Bono Analytics (PBA) to (1) review their processes, (2) provide guidance on streamlining and data management, and (3) make recommendations on metric development to appropriately answer questions for a comparative analysis of the two courts. NDS has a larger goal that their developed dataset will help reveal trends in legal representation, courtroom practices, defendant demographics, social service needs, and so on.

(2) Formalize the Neighborhood Defender Service holistic model as a system. Literature review of looking at other similar models and key mertics needed analyze the models success