Cumulative Caseload First, the scaffolding of the juvenile court system is too weak to support the weight of a cumulative caseload. Almost by design, the number of cases to be heard will increase every year. This was happening before the explosion of crack. The caseload is cumulative because more cases enter the court system every year than leave it. This is how it works.
Juvenile courts supervise children in foster care for the entire time that children are in care.
So if 500 children enter foster care in a hypothetical jurisdiction in a given year, there will be 1,000 review hearings in the year after the adjudication and disposition. Some of those children will be returned home or adopted. Assuming that the number of new cases stayed the same, and that half of the first year's children left the court's jurisdiction by the start of the second year, the court would still have to hold 500 review hearings for the first year's children in addition to the 1,000 hearings for children newly placed in foster care. Thus, even it the number of new referrals remained constant, the number of court hearings would increase each year. The number is diminished only by the number of children aging out of the system, freed for adoption, or returned home.