La scelta dei criteri di priorità per il giudice penale: effetti sui carichi pendenti e sul costo sociale[Priorities criteria and criminal caseload management]

Courts management is going to become a very important branch in the study of jurisdiction, following with rising interest in finding out how productive courts are. The aim of this paper is to analyse caseload management and the outcomes of different choice criteria for dealing with criminal trials. Following the current political debate relating to “blocca-processi” we will focus on quantitative effects of priorities and guidelines in caseload trial management. We will use detailed data from ISTAT to define the workload of a representative judge and select the different crimes on his desktop: most serious crimes (red crimes), average offences (yellow crimes) and light crimes (green crimes). Using an agent-based-model (abm) we tested different criteria: the actual legal framework (first in first out), the provision of priorities based on seriousness of the offences, and a criterion based on crime diffusion. Since reducing crime is the same as decreasing social losses caused by crime, the reduction of social cost of crime becomes an output of judicial services. Preliminary test results show that each criterion affects workload and caseload for different crimes, also considering the social costs of each crime.