Jim Hardin, a former district attorney who now has the vantage of the judge's bench, wants to help probation violation cases get swifter attention in Superior Court.

For the past several months, the Superior Court judge has been talking with probation and court officials to find out why, on average, it takes 231 days for a probation violation report to be resolved in Durham.

Orlando Hudson, the county's resident chief Superior Court judge, encouraged Hardin to take on the study.

"It is my hope," Hudson said, "by assessing our current system's strengths and weaknesses, we can craft a system or court process that is responsive to the needs of our community and that also helps to serve probationers successfully complete court-ordered obligations."

Hardin, who has been juggling his fact-finding endeavors with judicial duties, hopes to have a report in April.

He expects to propose a management system similar to the one instituted to usher Durham criminal cases through the system. The case management system lets judges see cases at different stages and, if need be, speed their resolution.

The analysis comes in the wake of a News & Observer investigative series published in December. The newspaper found that since the beginning of 2000, 580 people under the probation system's watch had killed. The series also showed the probation system had lost track of nearly 14,000 convicted criminals.

The Durham probation office, with its poor case management, high turnover and lingering vacancies, has been held up for much of the past year as a prime example of what is wrong with the probation system.

Problems were exposed after local university students Eve Carson and Abhijit Mahato were killed. Their accused killers had been on probation in Durham and Wake counties. One went a year without hearing from his probation officer. The other never met his.

Hardin, whose analysis is focused on Superior Court cases only, said his investigation seems to show the average resolution time is lengthened by a high number of absconders -- probationers who miss curfew checks and office meetings for at least a month.

Durham probation officers, for much of the past year, had lost track of 20 percent of the people assigned to their watch. Because those cases linger in the court system, Hardin said, the average number of days it takes to bring a violation to resolution is high.

"That's skewing the average," Hardin said. "We think we've figured out an answer for getting the statistics in shape so they're more reflective of the status of pending cases."

With expanded computer systems that provide probation officers more information about their charges and better communication with law enforcement, Hardin hopes Durham court officials will be quicker to draw up standing arrest warrants for probationers who have absconded.

"It will be easier to track these people," Hardin said.