Imagine a stack of paper 40 stories high. That’s how much paper the San Diego County juvenile justice system was using each year related to court cases. Enter the Justice Electronic Library System (JELS), a collaborative effort of the county’s juvenile justice agencies, technology office and its outsourcing provider Hewlett Packard.  The end result is a state-of-the-art system that saves money, time and resources while improving the juvenile justice system.

The San Diego County Juvenile Court system is a busy place, holding approximately 25,000 hearings a year. Prior to every hearing, a report for each juvenile is provided by the Probation department to the District Attorney, Court and defense, which in turn sort, collate and pull hard files for inclusion in court reports. The County estimates that more than 1 million pages of documents are produced each year. Since a juvenile may stay in the system for years, resulting in numerous hearings, a single case could include more than 100 separate documents and reports.