Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court
“Nudges” and criminal justice
Criminal justice policy in the United States focuses on increasing negative consequences to deter undesired behavior. However, defendants often appear relatively insensitive to these changes in the severity of consequences. Fishbane et al. considered a different policy lever: improving the communication of information necessary to adhere to desired behavior (see the Perspective by Kohler-Hausmann). They found that redesigning a criminal summons form to highlight critical information and providing text message reminders increased the likelihood that defendants would show up to their appointed court date, thus eliminating a substantial percentage of arrest warrants for failing to appear in court. In follow-up experiments, the authors found that laypeople, but not experts, believe that such failures to appear are relatively intentional, and this belief reduces their support for interventions aimed at increasing awareness rather than punishment. These findings have implications for policies aimed at improving criminal justice outcomes.
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Each year, millions of people in the United States are required to appear in court for low-level offenses. Many defendants miss their court dates. Criminal justice policy often uses punitive sanctions to deter these failures to appear. For example, when defendants fail to appear, arrest warrants are issued, which draws defendants further into the criminal justice system. These policies presume that defendants pay attention to these penalties and weigh them when deciding whether to appear in court. In this study, we explore a different possibility for why defendants might miss court—simple human error. Although defendants are given all of the relevant information they need, they might be insufficiently aware of this information—it might not be salient enough or defendants might forget it.
RATIONALE
We conducted two large-scale field studies in New York City evaluating interventions to make defendants more aware of court information. In the first study, we redesigned the summons form that defendants receive for low-level offenses. The old summons form listed court information at the bottom of the form below less important information (e.g., the defendant’s physical characteristics and details about the issuing officer), which makes it easy to overlook. The redesigned form moves court information to the top of the ticket, where people are more likely to see it. It also clearly states in bold typeface on the front of the form that missing the assigned court date will lead to a warrant. In the second study, we augmented the redesigned form by sending text messages to highlight critical court information for defendants in the week leading up to their court appearance.
In laboratory experiments, we tested how quickly people could identify, and how well they could remember, court information on the old and new forms. Then, we examined laypeople’s and experts’ beliefs about whether failures to appear were intentional and how these beliefs affected their support for nudges to reduce failures to appear.
RESULTS
The redesigned summons form and text messages reduced failures to appear on average by 13 and 21%, respectively. In our laboratory experiments, people who saw the new forms identified court information more quickly (and recalled it more accurately). This suggests that a meaningful proportion of defendants who fail to appear are not intentionally skipping court but are effectively unaware of court.
We estimate that these nudges helped avoid at least 30,000 arrest warrants being issued over 3 years, and they resulted in approximately 20,000 people having their cases fully dismissed instead of having an open warrant. We see suggestive evidence that these nudges were more effective for defendants living in poorer neighborhoods. Additionally, the bulk of warrants avoided are for defendants living in poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents—though this reflects, rather than repairs, existing disparities in how summonses are issued.
However, in our laboratory experiments on people’s attitudes, we find that laypeople believe failures to appear for court are more intentional than other failures to act (e.g., missing medical appointments). And although laypeople can be prompted to see how defendants might mistakenly miss court, their default assumption is to see it as intentional. This assumption reduces support for these nudges and increases support for more punitive approaches to reducing failures to appear. Criminal justice experts (e.g., prosecutors and judges), however, do not share this intuition—they are more likely to believe that failures to appear are unintentional and to support these nudges.
CONCLUSION
This work suggests that there is a straightforward explanation for why many defendants miss court—information about their court dates is not sufficiently salient. Although simple nudges can remedy this, policy-makers have been slow to experiment with and adopt them. Instead, criminal justice policy on failures to appear often hews closer to laypeople’s intuitions. Widespread adoption of interventions such as these might depend on a shift in the assumptions of why failures to appear happen. Otherwise, these policies risk merely punishing people, not deterring actions.
Reducing failures to appear.
In two field studies, we made court information more salient by redesigning the court summons form and sending text messages to defendants. We find that these interventions significantly reduced the rate at which defendants missed their court dates for low-level offenses, and fewer arrest warrants were issued as a result.
Abstract
Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13 to 21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. In laboratory experiments, we find that whereas criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. These lay beliefs reduce support for policies that make court information salient and increase support for punishment. Our findings suggest that criminal justice policies can be made more effective and humane by anticipating human error in unintentional offenses.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Supplementary Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S9
Tables S1 to S13
MDAR Reproducibility Checklist
Resources
References and Notes
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Volume 370 | Issue 6517
6 November 2020
6 November 2020
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Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
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Received: 10 March 2020
Accepted: 24 September 2020
Published in print: 6 November 2020
Acknowledgments
We greatly appreciate the support of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, in particular E. Glazer, A. Crohn, A. Meizlish, and A. LaScala-Gruenewald; the New York City Police Department, in particular Deputy Commissioner S. Herman, Detective K. Rice, and Lieutenant D. O’Hanlon; and the New York State Unified Court System Office of Court Administration, in particular J. Barry, J. Hill, K. Kane, C. Cadoret, and Z. Bedell. Any data provided herein does not constitute an official record of the New York State Unified Court System, which does not represent or warrant the accuracy thereof. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not those of the New York State Unified Court System, which assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. We thank J. Ludwig and S. Mullainathan for helpful comments. We thank C. Avellan, M. Bluestine, H. Furstenberg-Beckman, J. Leifer, K. Lorenzana, S. McAuliffe, R. Ander, K. B. Falco, B. Z. Diop, E. Fletcher, C. Hanlock, J. Lefkowitz, D. Mungia Gomez, E. Packis, B. Pinder, K. Pinder, A. Yates-Berg, and Z. Honoroff for invaluable project assistance. We especially thank B. Cooke and J. Hayes for their work on the design of the text message intervention and experiment and for their outstanding management of the project and partners. We also thank C. Burke for graphic design assistance. This research was approved by the University of Chicago’s Institutional Review Board (protocols IRB15-0206 and IRB17-0928). Funding: This work was supported with grants from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Author contributions: All authors contributed to the research design, to reviewing the findings, and to writing the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests. Data and materials and availability: Preregistration details, all analysis code, data from the laboratory experiments, and anonymized data allowing researchers to reproduce results from the field experiments are available on OSF (https://osf.io/mb6x7/).
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