By D. James Greiner & Eric Krebs
Can we do anything about failure to appear in criminal cases? According to Alissa Fishbane, we can, and for once, what we can do is cheap and easy.
Fishbane’s work is premised on a simple idea: big problems sometimes are susceptible to small solutions. Fishbane is a Managing Director at ideas42, a nonprofit think tank which uses behavioral science to design scalable, effective solutions to social, economic and legal issues. Her goal is to “influence behavior for the good of humanity,” and in a recent conversation on Proof over Precedent with host Jim Greiner, Fishbane explained how seemingly minor changes to how the legal system communicates with defendants can yield surprisingly large reductions in missed court dates.
By the way, the “42” in ideas42 does come from where you think it does.
“From a systems perspective, missed court dates create a whole cascade of problems,” says Fishbane. “ Cases are slowed, dockets have to be rescheduled, and bench warrants are issued—meaning that people are arrested and jailed and that police and sheriffs are dealing with this rather than public safety issues… [It’s] a hidden crisis in our country, and it’s something we’re all paying the cost of.” In 49 states, missing a court date is considered a crime and occupies a lot of court and law enforcement time. For example, according to the Vera Institute, in New Mexico, failures to appear accounted for 61 percent of all arrest warrants issued by a selection of local courts surveyed by the Vera Institute.
But, as Fishbane’s research illustrates, low-cost interventions such as redesigning summons and traffic tickets—and simply texting people to remind them of their court dates—are highly effective at reducing missed dates, resulting in fewer penalties for defendants, more efficient adjudication, and savings for the justice system as a whole.
The first step in fixing the problem of no-shows is understanding why people miss court. The traditional narrative that people who miss court dates do so on purpose—out of a desire to ‘evade justice’—is, as Fishbane puts it, “a myth.” “Most people are trying to go. They intend to go. They want to comply, and some go to great lengths to try and do so.” So the problem isn’t a desire to avoid court. Rather, logistical issues like lack of transportation, conflicting work schedules, and childcare often get in the way.
Moreover, defendants often lose track of when and where they’re supposed to be going in the first place. One survey of individuals in Kentucky and Utah found that the two most common reasons for failures to appear were defendants’ (i) not knowing or understanding that they had a court hearing at all, or (ii) forgetting the hearing date.
Redesigned Court Summons in New York City
Research by ideas42 demonstrates how the justice system can reduce the informational gaps that drive failures to appear through low-cost tweaks to how courts communicate with individuals. In one ideas42 field study, researchers redesigned summons forms in New York City.
Summons forms are tickets given to low-level offenders—typically for quality-of-life offenses like public alcohol use—which initiate court proceedings. In 2014, an astounding 41% of all individuals who were given summons failed to appear in court, resulting in 130,000 missed court dates and corresponding arrest warrants. (For two minor offenses—public urination or consumption of alcohol—individuals also had the option to resolve their summons by mail.)
In partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), New York City Police Department (NYPD), and New York State Office of Court Administration (OCA), ideas42 proposed an inexpensive intervention: making summons easier to understand.
The redesigned tickets featured easier-to-understand titles, clearer statements of court-date times and locations, and more direct statements of the consequences of not showing up to court. An initial trial showed promising results: simply redesigning the paper summons reduced failures to appear by 13%, equivalent to 17,000 fewer arrest warrants per year.
ideas42 didn’t stop there. The team also piloted a variety of text-message reminders for defendants, testing different communication styles and content. Some 20,000 summons recipients were randomized to either remain in the control group or receive messages focused on the consequences of not appearing, messages focused on making plans to appear, or a combination of both. Receiving any pre-court date messages reduced failures to appear by 21%, with the most effective messages—a combination of plan-making- and consequence-based messages—reduced failures to appear by 26%. Combined with the redesigned summons, a simple graphical change and three texts could reduce failures to appear by over 35%.
Additionally, ideas42 tested using text messages to incentivize people to resolve outstanding warrants after a failure to appear, and the messages were similarly effective, finding up to a 32% reduction in open warrants for people who received a combination message set prior to court date—emphasizing planning and repercussions—and a post-failure-to-appear message. One effective message in the post-failure to appear batch simply made clear that the individual would not be arrested for showing up to court to resolve their warrant.
“Stamping Out” Failures to Appear in Sacramento
ideas42 also tested a similarly simple intervention in Sacramento, California: mailing people a reminder of their upcoming court dates. Researchers began the quasi-experiment in 2023, and, within the first year, failures to appear decreased by 16% (8.2 percentage points) from a baseline of 51%, averting 1,115 nonappearances.
The project also demonstrates the high cost-effectiveness of such interventions. The total implementation cost for the project was $10,973.05, or just $9.84 per failure to appear averted, with the benefits from each averted failure to appear totaling $2,850 in avoided fees, costs, and wasted resources—a benefit of 290:1.
As Fishbane put it, the projects show that “seemingly small changes … can have really profound impacts on people’s lives.”
If you’re interested in more details of this project, listen to our Proof Over Precedent podcast episode on the topic.