About me
Cara Lane Cape is the Executive Staff Advisor at the Department of Public Advocacy (DPA). Ms. Cape received both a BSW and a Master of Social Work from Campbellsville University. Ms. Cape began her career at Protection and Permanency in Grayson County, where she was chief investigator. In 2010, Ms. Cape began working at DPA, where she held an administrative position in the Bowling Green Trial Office while completing her graduate degree. In 2011, Ms. Cape transferred to DPA’s Main Office in Frankfort, where she held positions in the Appeals Branch and Post-Trial Division Director’s Office, until finally ending up in the Office of the Public Advocate in 2013 as a policy analyst. While working in the Office of the Public Advocate, Ms. Cape was an instrumental part of the JustWare Case Management Team. Through this role, Ms. Cape was directly involved in the implementation, customizing, and maintaining of DPA’s case management system JustWare, as well as provided training to all employees statewide, including the Louisville-Jefferson County Public Defender Corporation. Ms. Cape assisted in streamlining data points within JustWare to be used in the Kentucky DPA Outcome Study through the Center for Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR) at the University of Kentucky, in addition to providing ongoing data validation for the study. In 2015, Ms. Cape became the first Alternative Sentencing Worker Program Supervisor in the newly established Defender Services Branch of DPA’s Law Operations Division. While in this role, Ms. Cape along with Robert Walker, MSW, LCSW of the CDAR published the SFY 2015 Evaluation Report on DPA’s Alternative Sentencing Worker Program.
