Feedback for Justice

Natasha Marshall, Feedback Labs | March 25, 2024

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The Bail Project is a national nonprofit that provides free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people every year while advancing policy change at the local, state, and national levels. It is on a mission to combat mass incarceration by eliminating reliance on cash bail and demonstrating that a more humane, equitable, and effective pretrial system is possible. Through our Community Release with Support model, we provide our clients with return-to-court services including court notifications, free transportation assistance, and referrals to voluntary services. These interventions have helped nearly 30,000 people return to court 91% of the time with none of their own money on the line, preserving the presumption of innocence and demonstrating the efficacy of needs-based pretrial support. Learn more about The Bail Project at bailproject.org.

The Bail Project is looking to create more opportunities to receive feedback from the clients we serve with our model, which is known as Community Release with Support. Under this model, The Bail Project’s clients receive free bail assistance and supportive services that help ensure that clients return to court when they are released pretrial. These supportive services include court notifications, travel assistance, and voluntary referrals to services like housing assistance and clinical services to treat mental illness and addiction. We are looking to strengthen our client feedback processes to better understand how our clients experience our services. To be effective, our client engagement and feedback processes must recognize the power imbalances that can often exist between social service organizations and their clients, especially when organizations play such a significant role in a client’s life, such as enabling someone’s release from jail. We also need to consider our remote context when developing feedback processes, as most of our staff engage with clients remotely instead of in-person. Starting at our Cincinnati, Ohio site, we wish to pilot a process for collecting meaningful feedback from clients which can inform a larger client feedback strategy for the organization.

Improving Client Engagement & Participation
The first question that The Bail Project brought to the LabStorm was how they could improve client engagement and participation in their feedback practices. Some of the suggestions brought up by discussion participants included considering courtesy bias when receiving feedback, considering demographics when collecting feedback and being clear at the start of the relationship that the organization is going to collect and utilize feedback. Others suggested collecting feedback multiple times and creating private online groups so clients are more encouraged to leave honest feedback.

Structured Feedback for Meaningful Improvements
Another question brought to the discussion was how The Bail Project can implement structured feedback processes in order to continually consider feedback and make meaningful improvements. Participants suggested collecting feedback multiple times so that TBP gets an updated idea of improvements their clients would like to see. They also suggested involving clients as much as possible into the decision making process as they receive services from TBP, that way they are able to provide feedback consistently.

Mitigating Against Impediments
The final major question was how The Bail Project can work around the biggest impediments to client feedback collection. LabStorm discussion members had ideas including ensuring that a culture of feedback is established within the organization, showing clients how the organization has previously acted on feedback and including people who have previously been incarcerated or received services from TBP sit in on initial discussions with clients to help determine how to implement feedback.

Some of the key takeaways The Bail Project had from the discussion were that it’s important to let people tell their own stories so the organization doesn’t shape their experience with the service too much, TBP should focus on ways to make their organization better but not so much that it distracts from their current mission and that it can be helpful to work with client families. This discussion captured not only the importance of collecting feedback, but also working more directly with clients to ensure that they have the best experience possible for them as an individual.

Learn More About LabStorms

LabStorms are collaborative problem-solving sessions designed to help organizations tackle feedback-related challenges or share what’s working well in their practice.