Rich or poor, we are entitled to equal justice. But bail creates a two-tier system: One for people with money, and one for everyone else. The Bail Project pays bail for those in need – for free. At the same time, we are working to take money out of justice. Our mission is to create a fairer system, one that truly treats people as innocent until proven otherwise.
CivixKit in interview with The Bail Project.
With Mr. Jeremy Cherson (Director of Communications) and Ms. Erin George (National Director of Policy)
Q: How does outreach look like at The Bail Project? Do individuals typically reach out to you directly, or do you primarily work with clients through referrals from courts or public defenders?
“We receive referrals from multiple mechanisms. They include public defenders, sometimes prosecutors, sometimes family members and loved ones. Sometimes the individuals are themselves. So our information gets passed around in different custodial settings. People become aware of the work. Sometimes jail administrators reach out to us because they understand the crisis created by unnecessary incarceration.”
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)“Sometimes community providers, so folks who might have a connection to different individuals in the community, as those who operate different community-based organizations. So we try to cast a wide net. We try to make sure that our resources are widely known and available.”
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)“We also have different teams … locally that support some of that outreach effort. And that's the way that we make ourselves known.
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)Q: What approaches have you found most effective in building trust with people and communities that you work alongside?
"I think our information speaks for itself. We seek to use our work to demonstrate the viability of pretrial release, and we work to make sure that the pretrial system is safer and fairer by interrupting what would be a two-tiered system of justice where people who have money can pay bail and be released and people who don’t remain incarcerated. I think people recognize the sort of disparity that exists there and the unfairness that's inherent in a system like that, so that galvanizes support for our work in the larger movement.”
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)“Generally speaking, relationship building, whether it's for establishing a new site, a new bailout site, or whether it's when you're in the landscaping process for a policy campaign, is similar… You wanna take a look at the system stakeholders that are implicated by the issue.
So when we're talking about bail and jails, we're talking about sheriffs, we're talking about judges and the courts, court clerks, we're talking about maybe overlaid city law enforcement, public defenders… We know that people with mental health issues and substance use issues are dramatically overrepresented in the pretrial system and dramatically overrepresented in jails… So you would want to see, are there groups that are providing mental health services or doing mental health advocacy that we should make a connection with to try to identify where there's shared alignment and values and goals.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)“Moreover… [we show evidence]. We show that we can release people safely and effectively, and that they return to court. Our work shows that of the nearly 35,000 people we've released, they've returned to court about 93% of the time.”
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)“I think something that has allowed us to build really strong relationships across both the direct service work and the policy work is not avoiding conversations with people in groups that you may anticipate would oppose an issue, or maybe not be fully on the same page… Even if you don't get to ultimate alignment, sometimes it may surprise you..”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)What is unique about bail reform as an advocacy strategy, and how does The Bail Project tailor its approach specifically to the criminal legal system?
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"What makes the bail projects model unique is this combination of direct service provision, which is our free bail assistance and our referrals to key supportive services, our court reminders or travel assistance and the referrals to the different care options. That serves to provide a sort of immediate intervention to address immediate needs that people have, to avoid people being unnecessarily incarcerated just because they can't afford to pay bail."
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
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"But at the same time, that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a holistic long-term solution, because the way to do those sorts of things requires legislative advocacy and policy advocacy, recognizing the mechanics of government. So if you want longstanding solutions to problems, you need to either change laws or you need to change policies"
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
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"So you have to think about campaigns in this holistic way. The direct services really serve as a demonstration of an alternative. We use that as evidence, and we tell stories about our clients as well to change narratives about how people understand the individuals who get wrapped up in the system.Then we use those as talking points when we're talking to powerful people to make sure that they will understand the problem and hopefully change the necessary laws."
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
Q: How does a bail project balance rapid-response legal advocacy for individual clients with long-term systemic reform, like ending cash bail?
“I think a huge part of it is how we’re internally structured. So as an organization, we have several main departments. We've got a policy department, the communications department. We have a marketing team. Then we have our operations as the department that runs the direct services, data and research, heavily supporting that work, though we do partner with them on publications, and partner with them on some of our policy campaigns. Probably two-thirds direct service staff or data research, and one-third policy comms marketing.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)
“Finding balance is as much a result of organizational structure and resourcing as it is of strategy. In the nonprofit sector, especially among community-based organizations, it is uncommon for groups to engage in both direct services and advocacy. When organizations attempt to do both, the challenge becomes coordination. They must ensure the two areas are not operating independently, but instead reinforce one another. Ideally, insights from direct service work should inform and strengthen advocacy efforts.”
— Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
How important is collaborating with organizations working on the same or similar issues?
How do you think about identifying and prioritizing different audiences in a campaign?
Q: How do you collect critical data in extremely sensitive fields, especially within existing legal and judicial systems?
“A huge difficulty is the research and analysis piece that, in criminal justice particularly, involves the absence of high-quality data and the inability to do empirical research, mostly because of the difficulty of working with the populations that we work with, long-term tracking, and longitudinal studies that are extremely costly, extremely difficult to do, and largely absent in the field.”
—Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications) “And I think it often, because research is so difficult with certain client populations, the court data, the jail data is also very low quality in most places. If it's available at all. That forces us to either avoid it, but that is a problem because if you talk to government people, they're going to say, okay, you're just giving me anecdotes. How do I know that this will work? How do I implement this if I put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind setting up the types of programs that you're recommending we set up, why should we do it? How do we know it'll work? So, I think that more or less, there are moral imperatives that motivate legislative action that happens often as a result of direct action and people in the streets demanding change. That does something. But at the same time, I think when it comes to real bureaucratic, technocratic styles of government, which are prevalent these days, they do want research. And I think nonprofits particularly discount the value of doing that work and that can be detrimental.”
—Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications) Q: Which of your strategies has been most effective in challenging misconceptions/stigma about pretrial incarceration and driving policy reform?
“One of the things that we're uniquely positioned to do as the bail project in our policy work is identify trends and problems with the pretrial system that we're seeing with our clients. There is the ultimate goal of ending cash bail, and that requires an extraordinary range of interventions.
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)“In conversations with legislators and supporters, and the general public, personal stories are incredibly impactful. I think that personal stories, even behind the scenes, we share our own stories of how we came to this work, and it creates trust and rapport with legislators and puts a face to the issue.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)“It also needs to include due process provisions that ensure that the default doesn't become detention and preventative detention. It needs to include funding for legal representation from the earliest point and big, massive structural reforms like that take many years to get towards.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)“But then I also think that our data speaks for itself. I have been in plenty of meetings where legislators or community partners, or faith communities, business communities, groups that may not be as familiar with our issue. And the numbers of the success of our bailouts are really compelling, right? Demonstrating that people will return safely to court without this cash bail intervention and without a huge list of mandatory requirements that they have to complete pre-trial.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)
“When it comes to criminal justice reform, I would say that oftentimes, they feel reassured to know that something has happened elsewhere. And so I think that that is something else that's really valuable that we're able to bring to the table from the micro level with what we learn through the work with clients and then the macro level of monitoring all pretrial policy activity nationally and working in many of these states with state and local groups.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)
“One of the things in our policy campaigns and coalitions that we often really bring to the table is being able to share the policy changes that may have not been super publicized in other states that are examples of the sort of change that the advocates in the current state might be moving towards. And that becomes fuel for their conversations with lawmakers, people, and legislators.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)
“There are a ton of people incarcerated in the United States because they are struggling with addiction or mental health issues. And I think there is a general perception that we should not be incarcerating those people. But the real regressive pushback against that is fear-based, is the narratives that you hear about, we're just letting dangerous people out on the street. One incident like that can discount, completely eliminate all the hundreds and thousands of people that were safely released because that fear really matters. This is a unique issue in that way, that everybody wants to be safe, everybody deserves to be safe. But if there is something that happens that threatens that sense of safety, the perception of safety, you can lose a lot of ground.”
—Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
“Issues go hand in hand. However, there is no way to address the problem of mass incarceration without tackling bail reform. There are people that are unnecessarily incarcerated because of money alone. Then there are going to be problems with jail, such as jail bloating, which is a system failure across the board. And if you're interested in changing that problem, you have to tackle this issue as well as a variety of other issues there, such as mental health and behavioural health problems.”
—Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)
Q: What advice would you give to new grassroots advocates who want to engage in legal and social justice work but lack funding and legal expertise?
“Landscaping is essential. Organizations need to identify which groups are working on similar issues at the local or state level, understand what work has already been done, and determine whether those efforts are still ongoing. From there, they should connect directly with those groups to discuss emerging challenges and opportunities in the field.”
“Moreover, understanding of basic civics is critical here. Representative democracy is designed to represent. So the opportunities to sit in on local government meetings can be crucial.”
“People tend to be very generous and open in the advocacy field and in the social justice space. Maybe there's an intersecting issue that you've seen a bunch in the newsroom media, right? So if I was going to start something from scratch in a place I'd never worked, I would probably reach out to people who I did know and trusted who might know organizations there to refer me. I would do desk research to see what are these other groups.”
“You may find, and there are some states that we work in like this, that almost nobody was working on pretrial reform. Folks were happy to have us in the space and happy to support the efforts, but even criminal justice organizations were focused on different parts of the system. In other places, you may find that there's a really active effort going on where the big value add is, to your point, getting youth engaged in the movement or mobilizing phone calls to legislators at key points.”
“In some cases, quiet advocacy is the best advocacy. So, really making sure that you understand the landscape on the ground to determine whether or not really making things visible and public is helpful, or in some instances can be harmful, and then figuring out who the targets are and should be.”
— Ms. George (National Director of Policy)“Just observing, using opportunities to make public comments, and figuring out how to leverage social media, which younger generations are often more effective at than older ones. With all the chaos in the United States government, the things that tend to gain traction can be a very intense public comment calling out politicians directly. Though you have to find the right balance, because that approach does not always work.”
—Mr. Cherson (Director of Communications)“And then I'd call and talk to those groups about my idea. What are their priorities? What do they think? Who should I talk to? And then you get into that sort of second layer of more informed by someone who does the advocacy work. Because that's going to allow you to figure out where you can have the greatest impact and what approach is going to be the most responsible and add value to the field.”
“You know, people become defensive, and that creates a certain stubbornness. They become entrenched in their positions because they feel they are being called out. Sometimes that kind of fragility needs to be managed. You have to figure out how to make people feel like you are working together in the process. Oftentimes, work happens without a clearly identified goal or a plan. You cannot do any of the subsequent work unless you have a clear, strategic, and measurable goal that you know you are trying to achieve.”
Q: If you could give a piece of advice for starting organizations or grassroots campaigns. What would that piece of advice be?
“Don't set up an organization without talking to researchers.”
“If you're providing some kind of direct service and you don't figure out what data to collect, if you don't figure out a theory of change … you can really shoot yourself in the foot. Often, researchers are discounted in those early processes because they're sometimes very wonky and nerdy, but they are the people who understand statistics. And statistics is a valuable currency for certain lawmakers or policymakers, you have to do that right.”
“Relationships are paramount.”
“Those relationships will be what sustain you when you're going through challenging moments, and those may be relationships with people in other organizations. Relationships are what ultimately allow you to build trust and move decision-makers. Relationships are how you get to take joy in celebrating a big win collectively.”
“Resilience, resilience, and resilience.”
“Tackling very difficult, long-standing, and intractable problems often comes with constant setbacks and discouraging outcomes. So the cliché that this work is a marathon, not a sprint, is true. What makes it difficult is that these issues require urgent responses, yet meaningful outcomes rarely happen with the same urgency … so building resilience early on is a non-negotiable.”