Text message reminders for court docket appearances can scale back warrants and pretrial incarceration

Have you ever forgotten about an upcoming physician’s appointment—solely to be reminded the day earlier than by a textual content out of your physician’s workplace? People with authorized obligations may also neglect about upcoming court docket dates, however the penalties are extra dire than a no-show price. Across America, missed court docket dates routinely end in warrants and arrests.

In a brand new examine, printed within the open-access journal Science Advances, researchers at NYU, Harvard, and Stanford created software program that despatched textual content messages to shoppers of public defenders in California, reminding them of upcoming court docket dates. They discovered that reminders considerably decreased the charges of bench warrants (warrants for arrest following failure to seem in court docket) and pretrial incarceration.

“It’s remarkable that we can prevent the high costs of pretrial incarceration with text message reminders that cost just a few cents per case,” says lead writer Alex Chohlas-Wood, assistant professor of computational social science at NYU Steinhardt.

“This outcome is both great for defendants—who avoid the steep costs of a jail stay—and good for the public at large, which has historically paid the cost of keeping some people in jail simply because they forgot to attend court.”

The analysis was carried out in partnership with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office in San Jose, California. The researchers randomly assigned 5,709 shoppers to certainly one of two teams: one group of two,898 shoppers who obtained textual content message reminders, and a management group of two,811 who obtained no messages. The textual content message group obtained reminders seven days, three days, and at some point earlier than every upcoming court docket date.

The findings confirmed that textual content reminders decreased bench warrants by roughly 20% (12.1% of shoppers within the management group obtained warrants in comparison with 9.7% within the therapy group). Similarly, pretrial incarceration dropped by 21% (6.6% within the management group in comparison with 5.2% within the therapy group).

The researchers additionally decided that the influence was comparable when shoppers no matter whether or not they had a misdemeanor or felony-level case.

“Our study underscores how interventions that address mental barriers can encourage desired behavior above and beyond the impact of traditional, punitive measures alone. Interventions like these can and should play a vital role in improving the criminal justice system,” says Chohlas-Wood.