For funders
The case for funding What Happens Now: the need, the theory of change, and what a grant actually pays for.
The need
Every year, local jails in the United States record about 7.9 million admissions, and at any moment 69 percent of the people held are unconvicted and awaiting court (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2024 preliminary data). Florida recorded 315,030 arrests in 2024; the Alachua County Jail booked 5,174 distinct people in 2025. Nearly all of them have a family.
In the first 24 hours after an arrest, that family must find their person, understand first appearance, decide whether and how to post bond, find a lawyer, and manage phone and commissary deposits — with no guidance from any public institution. Every private party they encounter in those hours has a financial interest in their confusion: bail bond agents keep a non-refundable fee, jail phone vendors operate an industry of more than $1 billion a year, and commissary vendors charge a fee on every deposit.
The arrested person, meanwhile, is about to make one recorded phone call. What they say on it can cost them their case. Nobody tells them that. And Spanish-speaking families face all of this in a second language: Florida is 29.2 percent Hispanic or Latino, and the jail’s forms and phone trees are in English.
The theory of change
What we provide
Plain, verified, bilingual information delivered at the moment of arrest — to the family by QR code and to the person by a locked tablet, free to both forever. The software is open source under Apache-2.0; what institutions pay for is the verified county data and the work of keeping it true.
What we count
- Scans per booking, and kiosk views per booking shift.
- Language split, and questions per session — counts only, never content.
- Days since last verification, per county.
What partners count
From the sheriff’s office: information-line call volume before and after deployment. From the public defender: family attendance at first appearance, and the missed-arraignment rate.
What the evidence supports
Timely, plain information changes what happens next. Court-date reminders reduced failure-to-appear by 11 to 61 percent across eleven of twelve studies reviewed by the Pew Charitable Trusts (May 2025). A randomized trial of 5,709 public-defender clients in Santa Clara County, published in Science Advances (October 2025), reduced bench warrants by 20 percent and pretrial incarceration by 21 percent using three text messages. What Happens Now applies the same mechanism earlier — the first day instead of the week before court — and we will claim no effect of our own until the Alachua pilot produces one.
What funding buys
No grant money builds the core product — it is already built and costs about $0 a year to run. Grant funding pays for the verification labor and review work that scales with each new county. A grant of $50,000–$100,000 would fund:
- Native Spanish review and plain-language testing with families ($5,000).
- Verification and quarterly re-verification labor for the six counties of the 8th Circuit ($8,000).
- An outcome evaluation with the Public Defender, including data-sharing agreements and a simple before-and-after analysis, ideally with a University of Florida partner ($15,000–$40,000).
- Kiosk hardware for counties that cannot supply a tablet ($5,000).
- Attorney review of the copy, terms, and privacy policy ($2,000).
A note on status. Project Jail Cell, Inc. is a Florida nonprofit corporation applying for 501(c)(3) status. Once the determination letter arrives, it can apply directly to most funding open to any 501(c)(3), with no fiscal sponsor needed. We do not yet hold that letter, and we say so plainly.