Text message reminders for court appearances reduce warrants and pretrial incarceration

(Press-News.org) Have you ever forgotten about an upcoming doctor’s appointment—only to be reminded the day before by a text from your doctor’s office? People with legal obligations might also forget about upcoming court dates, but the consequences are more dire than a no-show fee. Across America, missed court dates routinely result in warrants and arrests.

In a new study, published in the open-access journal Science Advances, researchers at NYU, Harvard, and Stanford created software that sent text messages to clients of public defenders in California, reminding them of upcoming court dates. They found that reminders significantly reduced the rates of bench warrants (warrants for arrest following failure to appear in court) 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 author 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 research was conducted in partnership with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office in San Jose, California. The researchers randomly assigned 5,709 clients to one of two groups: one group of 2,898 clients who received text message reminders, and a control group of 2,811 who received no messages. The text message group received reminders seven days, three days, and one day before each upcoming court date.

The findings showed that text reminders reduced bench warrants by approximately 20% (12.1% of clients in the control group received warrants compared to 9.7% in the treatment group). Similarly, pretrial incarceration dropped by 21% (6.6% in the control group compared to 5.2% in the treatment group).

The researchers also determined that the impact was similar when looking at clients regardless of whether 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.

This study is co-authored by Madison Coots, doctoral student, Harvard Kennedy School; Joe Nudell, software engineer, Harvard Kennedy School; Julian Nyarko, professor of law, Stanford Law School; Emma Brunskill, associate tenured professor, Stanford University; Todd Rogers, professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School; and Sharad Goel, professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

This study was supported by funding from Stanford Impact Labs, Stanford Community Engagement, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Stanford Law School.

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