Computational Policy Lab
Encouraging appearance in court using techniques from behavioral science.
Criminal courts often take months or years to adjudicate a case. Meanwhile, many legally innocent defendants awaiting trial are held in jail to ensure they appear in court. But this pretrial detention is harmful to individuals and communities.
As an alternative, courts can also choose to release individuals into the community. But these “free” defendants are required to appear at mandatory criminal court hearings every few weeks. This task is a tremendous burden for poor and under-resourced individuals who are disproportionately impacted by the criminal legal system. When people accused of a crime fail to appear at their mandatory court hearings—usually because they lack transportation, childcare, a calendar, or medication for mental illness—courts can impose severe consequences. A missed court date usually results in an arrest warrant and automatic incarceration during the individual’s next encounter with courts or law enforcement.
Fortunately, it’s possible to cheaply and substantially improve court appearance rates by sending court date reminders to individuals. In partnership with the Santa Clara County Office of the Public Defender, we built an application that helps defenders communicate with their clients and sends automated court reminders to individuals with pending court dates.
Our research has already shown that these interventions measurably reduce pretrial incarceration. We’re now testing whether we can do better than standard court date reminders, including testing the heterogeneous impacts of different reminder templates, and evaluating whether providing monetary assistance can alleviate financial barriers to court attendance.
