Never Miss a Court Date Again: NYC Is Texting Reminders to New Yorkers About Their Court Date
Most of us at some point in our lives have missed an appointment or two. Hopefully, it wasn’t a big deal: You simply rescheduled. But when you skip a court date, the consequences for not showing up are far greater: A warrant may be issued for your arrest.
About 4 out of 10 New Yorkers who received one of the nearly 268,000 criminal summonses issued in NYC in 2016 failed to show up to court. To get more New Yorkers to attend their court dates, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, in partnership with the Office of Court Administration and NYPD, asked ideas42 (a behavioral design lab) and the University of Chicago Crime Lab to come up with a solution that will reduce the failure to appear rate.
Their solution: text message reminders. Though not a novel concept, the designers, utilizing their understanding of what behaviors led many people to miss their court dates, conducted a rigorous experiment to examine what phrasing of the text message reminders is the most effective at helping recipients overcome certain behavioral barriers.
And those barriers: “People forget, they have mistaken beliefs about how often other people skip court, they see a mismatch between minor offenses and the obligation to appear in court, and they overweigh the immediate hassles of attending court and ignore the downstream consequences,” noted ideas42 and the Crime Lab in “Using Behavioral Science to Improve Criminal Justice Outcomes.”
So, what did the experiment entail? The designers used a randomized controlled trial to test which text message reminders were the most impactful. Some people received pre-court text messages informing them about the consequences of not showing up to court, or messages encouraging them to plan their court appearance, or a combination of the two. And some received text messages if they missed their court appearance. One group didn’t receive any messages at all. For example, some messages stated:
- “Helpful reminder: go to court on Mon, Jun 3 09:30AM. We’ll text to help you remember. Show up to avoid an arrest warrant. Reply STOP to end texts.” This is an example of a pre-court message warning the recipient about the consequences of not showing up to court.
- “You have court on Mon June 03 at One Centre Street Manhattan. What time should you leave to get there by 9:30AM? Any other arrangements to make? Write out your plan.” This is an example of a pre-court message that encourages people to plan so they can arrive to court on time.
- “Most people show up to clear tickets but records show you missed court for yours. Go to court at One Centre Street Manhattan.” This is an example of a message a person who missed court and a warrant was issued receives, which informs the recipient that skipping court violates social norms.
The result: The combination text messages were the most effective. Over the seven-day period prior to their court date, people received a series of three messages that informed them about what to expect at court, warned them of the consequences of skipping court, and encouraged them to devise a plan to arrive on time. These messages helped decrease the number of missed court dates by 26 percent whereas receiving any pre-court message reduced the number of missed court dates by 21 percent.
Given the success of the pilot program, NYC launched the text-reminder program earlier this year. Now, all New Yorkers who received a summons and provided their cell phone number on the form will receive text reminders about their upcoming court dates.
“This is one of the first rigorous demonstrations of how behavioral science can inform criminal justice reform,” said Aurélie Ouss, a Crime Lab Affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania. “It indicates that it is possible to curb some offenses without resorting to stricter punishment, which is promising for improving the efficiency and fairness of the criminal justice system more broadly.”
