Six Essential Steps to Developing and Revising Pretrial Services

Pretrial reform is sweeping the country. If your agency is ready to engage in this worthwhile endeavor, where do you begin?

Developing and revising pretrial services requires a collaborative process that involves various stakeholders, including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement officials, community members, and researchers. This process typically involves the following steps:

1. Assess the current system: When seeking to review, modify, and develop an efficient and effective pretrial system, using a mapping process helps to identify all the justice touchpoints that could be potential change targets. Once each touchpoint has been identified, practitioners and their partners assess the strengths and weaknesses of each point.
2. Identify areas for improvement: Using the system mapping results along with researched best practices, practitioners, and stakeholders can collectively identify where pretrial services can be improved. This may include identifying gaps in service provision, processes that could reduce negative pretrial impacts, areas where there may be a risk of bias or discrimination, or issues related to resource allocation.
3. Create system goals: Once areas and methods of improvement are captured, it is important to narrow the scope to 1-2 priorities on which to focus change efforts. Some common targets include reducing jail bed days, creating effective diversion options for low-risk but high-need individuals, and reducing the full case resolution times.
4. Build an improvement plan: Selecting the top change priorities will guide the improvement plan and may even incorporate addressing some of the lower priority items as a corollary effect of reaching the system goal. A strategy for creating an effective improvement plan is to clearly declare the system goals using the SMART criteria. Working backward from the goal, identify who and what needs to be in place for that goal to be achieved. Repeat this process until the present-day stakeholders and resources are identified and assign individuals who have the skills and authority to successfully achieve their tasks.
5. Develop new policies and procedures: As the improvement plan is being executed, new policies and procedures will likely need to be created and implemented. To improve the likelihood of support and adoption, incorporate those whom the policies and procedures will most directly impact in the creation of the changes. The practitioner’s point of view will ensure that potential obstacles or barriers are mitigated before implementing new processes.
6. Ongoing measurement, evaluation, and revision: Collect metrics that identify the efficaciousness of the policies and practices that have been implemented. A core component of being a data-driven organization is the ongoing commitment to using data to measure and objectively evaluate new processes. Practitioners and stakeholders can help evaluate the data that is being collected and suggest corrective action if progress is not being achieved.

The practitioners at equivant Pretrial and our partner agencies are valued contributors to pretrial services reform and the ongoing evolution of our software solutions. Pretrial reform and a revision of your agency’s services can mean you need new software to support your new stated objectives. We invite you to take a look at how our Pretrial Module has grown over the last few years as a direct result of the contributions of those who have front-line experience. Schedule a demo today.