SAN JOSE — Sending text message reminders to indigent South Bay defendants reduced jailings for missed court appearances by at least 20%, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and New York universities that devised an automated system to help people remember their court dates.
The study, which involved thousands of people represented by the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, contends that missed court appearances more often than not the product of simple forgetfulness and a lack of familiarity with court procedure, rather than acts of defiance.
“Our results highlight the value of addressing cognitive and informational barriers to court attendance instead of relying solely on punitive measures to ensure attendance. With an average marginal cost of roughly 60¢ per defendant per case, automated text message reminders can be an effective and relatively inexpensive way to help people attend court and avoid incarceration,” the study reads.
Acting Public Defender Damon Silver said the text-messaging study is an example of a common-sense measure that accounts for the practical obstacles that his office’s clients often face.
“They are people operating on the edge of being overwhelmed anyway: people who are usually financially stressed, often struggling with employment, and meeting the basic necessities of life, if not also struggling with issues such as mental health challenges and substance abuse challenges,” Silver said.
He added: “These results speak to the fact that if you actually believe in people and take very small steps to invest in their success, more often than not they’re going to deliver. If we approach people in a supportive fashion and less a threatening fashion, we can achieve the results we want.”
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, spanned between 2022 and 2013 and evaluated 5,709 public defender clients split roughly in half between a control group and those who received automated text messages scheduled for seven days, three days, and one day before an upcoming court date. The subjects’ charges ranged between felonies, misdemeanors and violating supervision conditions like probation.
According to the study, 9.7% of those in the text-reminder group were issued bench warrants compared to 12.1% of those in the control group, a 20% difference. When assessing pretrial jailing, those splits were 5.2% versus 6.6%, a 21% gap.
The reduction in incarceration was a key question for Alex Chohlas-Wood, the study’s lead author and co-director of the Computational Policy Lab, first at Stanford and now as an associate professor at NYU. He said previous studies about the effectiveness of court date reminders did not robustly track their effect on jail time.
“It’s pretty remarkable we can reduce incarceration by sending a text message reminder,” Chohlas-Wood said. “This underscores the promise of these very simple interventions.”
About half the counties in the United States employ some kind of system for reminding people about upcoming court dates, whether it be by mail, phone call or text message, the study notes. Both Chohlas-Wood and Silver acknowledge that barriers still remain — including people who frequently change phone numbers — but say the study shows the vast majority of failures in court attendance have to do with practical issues.
“There is going to be a subset of folks who don’t have a stable address. And there are also folks in here who are charged with very low level crimes, and they forget a court date just like I forget my partner’s anniversary, and now they’re going to jail,” Chohlas-Wood said. “Both of those kinds of folks stand to benefit.”
Silver said he hopes the study helps change the narrative on his clients when they don’t make it to court, which can involve something as simple as a lack of transportation rather than illicit intent. That’s not to mention, he said, how daunting the court system can be to understand, from trying to interpret paperwork and sorting out placeholder court dates and different courthouses, and dates that get rescheduled without any notice.
He added that a measure like implementing text reminders is a modest cost compared to the resources expended on postponed court dates, bench warrants, arrests and jailings — which all stress an already-overburdened court system.
“But more important than the costs is the impact on the clients. You are disconnected from the legal system and then you get involuntarily connected with an arrest, it’s destabilizing. The likelihood of losing jobs, housing, and financial resources shoots through the roof,” Silver said. “Doing something that takes a little bit of front-end investment pays significant and measurable dividends going forward.”