Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court
science.sciencemag.org
science.sciencemag.org
I absolutely loathe research into the criminal justice system thats predicated on the aggravatingly trite idea that offenders are ignorant and apathetic. If you base your research around this, youre missing the point of how the criminal justice system by its very design predates on poor people and minorities.
Court dates cant be rescheduled. you cant show up 2-3 minutes late like you do to an office job or youll walk into the courtroom and go directly to jail. You cant call in sick to a court date, and in many cases your bail or release is contingent upon attendance. Youre pretty likely to miss a court date if youre poor, have one or more kids, or 3 jobs because missing the jobs means you cant feed the kids, and not taking care of the kids means the state takes the kids. Public transportation is also an excellent way to miss your court date, because it never runs on time. its a state-provided service causing your state-mandated court attendance to fail.
You can send me all the texts you want, but if my kids sick or i have to fill in a 16 hour shift at bloaty's pizza hog because my 19 year old coworker decided to road trip to Coachella this week and mandatory overtime is legal in the US, im still going to miss my court date.
texting someone their court dates is also predicated on the idea that the person has 'minutes on their phone' because poor people (surprise) dont whip out an iPhone 12 when they sign up for these alerts.
Might it be fair to also assume that anxiety, depression, and a general sense of hopelessness against a system you’ve maybe been treated unfairly by in the past might have something to do with why people miss court dates? I doubt that most of them just don’t care.
We 100% need to fix the larger dark patterns at play in the criminal justice system. We also need to not pretend that text message nudges are all we need here. But it’s possible some help from the system rather than feeling like it’s engineered for you to fail is a small step. And it isn’t fair to assume the worst of people who likely have pretty difficult life circumstances weighing them down.
That all counts as "apathetic" as I'd use the word.
But, it has helped in some cases, and its such low-hanging fruit. If you're working 3 jobs to stop the state from taking your kid, you probably don't have time to waste an hour parsing a user-hostile summons. This certainly doesn't fix everything, but it's a start.
There are a lot of other interesting CS problems building a project like this because of the optimization problems you immediately hit: how can I most effectively distribute the uber fees to people who need them the most. Criteria could include: how many bus transfers they have before being able to get to the court house, how "fragile" this process could be (because of late buses, etc),
I guarantee if you could build an MVP in your free time and show it on this site, you should be able to raise some money, at least enough for an experiment to show the website works correctly and effectively helps people get to their court dates. If that works, I'm confident you could get enough donations to get this project off the ground permanently (well, until the drug problems are fixed).
Because drug enforcement has clogged up so much of our legal system, it is conceivable that building a system like this could end up saving the state some money on fees since it would make it easier for people to show up on time. Also, since you have a centralized system with data on all interactions, you could improve your distribution algorithms by making sure people don't end up at the court late, causing the system to be unnecessarily further burdened.
> A law enforcement source told CBS2 a city program will offer those released incentives meant to encourage them to show up in court such as Mets baseball tickets, a subway pass or a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card. [0]
[0] https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/11/04/nyc-to-offer-mets-ti...
I'm definitely skipping bail then.
There is a lot of potential to make local government systems work better for all of their constituents, including those facing court appearances.
Abolish presumption of innocence for low-level offenses and jump straight to punishement and you do away with low-level court appearances to incentivize.
I kinda like the status quo by comparison, but YMMV.
Not being an asshole does not take effort, it takes basic respect.
I totally agree! But I also try to give it if I hope to receive it since there is no One Society that doesn't also include the asshole millionaires :)
I'd prefer we did away with the 'crime' aspect of it all and just say "you can park anywhere in the city you want -- designated or not -- for about $1000/hr, and after 10 hours or more, your car may be moved to a more secure location for storage at a service fee of another couple $1000". If we're supposed to be a capitalist society, I'd think we could be honest about it and just hang price tags on behavior communities don't want but that don't belong in any book detailing the punishments for various kinds of murder.
And, ah, most of the people showing up to those court summons aren't there to plead not guilty. They are there to say that they are really sorry, and to ask the judge to not punish them as much as he could.
My dad got a parking ticket from NYC. He hasn't left Pennsylvania in 15 years. Someone typoed a plate number. He either had to pay $55, drive over 100 miles to appear in court, or not pay the fine and become a criminal. How many people are victims of another's incompetence? Or get points on their license because they drove five miles over the speed limit on the day a shitty cop was trying to make their quota? Or lost their license because they had points from that situation, but still needed to get to work? There are so many gotchas that, for the middle class, amount to very little. But for less fortunate folks, can ruin their lives.
When you live paycheck to paycheck, the smallest infractions have a nasty habit of snowballing.
* keep everything like it is now.
* repeal all parking and speeding laws so you don't have to give these tickets, some of which will be given in error. Then just live in a world where there are vastly more traffic deaths and no one can drive in urban areas because people just park in the middle of the roads
* do away with the court date and assume everyone is guilty.
What should it be? No one likes shitty little fines but they have to be levied or you end up with worse results.
Also, if you can't afford an unexpected 55 dollar expense, your really can't afford a car. Sorry if that's blunt, but seriously. If you can't afford 55 dollars, you need to radically change how you live not gripe over whatever the cause of the expense was. And I'm 100% of the opinion that this should all be refunded when you prove your innocent...
Plenty of other places allow traffic tickets to be challenged in writing. Why can't New York?
Fyi: you can hire a lawyer to a represent you in cases like this. And Op is wrong: NYC does permit you to challenge parking tickets by post (and also by app or web). In fact they encourage it due to covid. So just write a letter with the details and some basic evidence of the error. That's how it should be.
I never understand why people can't understand: it's a rules based system, if you don't have to follow the rules, no one does and then it collapses. Americans in particular seem to really struggle with this but its just life...
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/vehicles/dispute-a-ticket.....
> He either had to pay $55, drive over 100 miles to appear in court, or not pay the fine and become a criminal.
with a comment listing some unreasonable alternatives. You didn't list the reasonable alternative of making a written response. My disagreement was with the situation presented in your comment and the one you were replying to; I live in a different country and don't know New York's actual legal system.
> I never understand why people can't understand: it's a rules based system, if you don't have to follow the rules, no one does and then it collapses. Americans in particular seem to really struggle with this but its just life...
I don't think anybody here (and only a very few ideologues elsewhere) is arguing against a rules-based system, or for people to disobey laws out of principle. I am arguing that the rules must be fair and reasonable, that people of all levels of intelligence and income can afford to follow. It would be unreasonable to force people to travel long distances or pay for an hour of a lawyer's time to address police mistakes. It would also be unreasonable to expect Pennsylvanians to know how to dispute a New York ticket in writing without clearly informing them (I don't know if that's what happened here, it's just an example).
- Require accountability from the government - Remove petty fines that serve no purpose except to raise money - Remove the ability for fines to be used as a source of revenue. - Ban civil forfeiture, which has exactly nothing to do with reducing crime
You're coming at this with an understanding that every law is just and serves a purpose. Consider yourself privileged for being able to grow up in a situation that afforded you such a privilege. If you were born poor and had no opportunity to lift yourself from poverty, $55 (especially a pointless and unjust $55) is substantive.
"The NYPD Was Systematically Ticketing Legally Parked Cars for Millions of Dollars a Year- Open Data Just Put an End to It"
https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-s...
"Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year"
https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/87573867759/success-how-nyc...
When you get back in your car you open the app and 'stop parking' and the app calculates the cost of the time you were parked (taking into account varying overnight and congestion zone rates). At the end of the month you get billed for that month's charges. You can also have multiple personas if you have a work vehicle/card.
In parts of south Florida there's a somewhat similar system where there's only one app you can use and money is taken immediately for the duration of the time you choose (with a small service fee included, of course). If you move your car before the expiration of your purchased time, you lose that value unless you repark in the same area [1]. The similarity is that the app will remind you that your parking is going to expire soon and you can simply extend (and pay that small service fee again, of course). I've seen this prepay-via-app model at various private parking facilities in other US cities as well.
[1]: The system uses number codes for what area you're parked in so you don't need to have location services necessarily (e.g. parking garage) with the code changing every couple streets.
https://i.imgur.com/wtKE33h.png
$50 ticket if I did that.
Try arguing with the issuing officer over the unlawful ticket or skipping the fine/court appearance and see which type of officers they send to enforce it.
I've had a ticket for something minor thrown out of court because the constable made a typo on my address when writing the ticket and even after I notified the city of the typo they still sent multiple court notices to the wrong address (which led to me never showing up to court).
They can have my phone number. They've likely already got it.
If not, then your speeding ticket encounter will probably just end in 'have a nice day'. There are obvious notable exceptions, but for the thousands of these interactions that occur every day, it is more likely the officer will die, than you [1].
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/leo/default.html#:~:text=In....
People are also missing the point: cops are not well trained, they panic just like everyone does. Hence my position it’s best to avoid interactions with them which involve firearms, legal or otherwise.
>> In the last 10 years, on average, an officer per week has been killed on our nation’s roads (2010-2019 = 53 deaths per year).1
The claim you made isn't directly supported by the citation. The cited article includes all police deaths on the road, not just ones arising from traffic stops.
Edit: and more to the point... wouldn't reducing the frequency of these interactions also improve the safety and wellbeing of police officers?
I’d really like to see any story about a cop killed by someone legally carrying a weapon after they’ve announced they have such a weapon.
My point is that the known presence of a legal gun is at least as safe as not knowing whether a gun or other weapon is present. A knife or blunt instrument can kill or critically injure within 2 seconds. Even the vehicle itself can be used as a weapon.
Saying the police should be more cautious when there is an acknowledged legal weapon present is equivalent to saying the police should be less cautious when no such weapon is claimed, even though a gun could still be present. That's obviously false even without bringing out any data.
My guess is that if you did bring out some data, you'd find that the presence of an acknowledged legal weapon is correlated with far fewer attempted murders of police than even the average stop, but certainly than stops in which there are illegal weapons.
Can you even provide a single incident where a legal holder of firearms told police during a traffic stop about his weapon and then attempted to shoot at the police?
I only mentioned it as a factor which presumably increases the risk of death, since there are notable cases of CCW holders being shot during traffic stops.
But that doesn't justify excusing the instances when it does happen. The entire point of having a justice system is to discourage criminal behavior, and provide a sense of fairness so that feuds do not escalate. When we see a violent criminal murder someone on camera but then not even get charged because they happen to be wearing a uniform, it's clear that system is in need of fixing. If you truly support law and order, then making sure that law is applied evenly should be your priority.
If we're worried about tracking that's a whole other topic. Here we're just talking about communication.
But I also find it a bit sad and maybe not totally sympathetic that people who receive a court summons can't pay attention / treat it seriously enough to remember to make it an important point to get themselves to court. You start to think that people who can't even get their lives together to remember a court date -- how many other things are they going to get into trouble with that we'll have to save them from too?
You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did. You would think that you could spend a few minutes not browsing Instagram and take certain things in life more seriously.
Also edit: totally not right that I'm being flagged for just having an unpopular opinion. I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone, or raising illegitimate points. Whoever is doing this is exactly falling into the behavior of trying to silence people you disagree with.
Lots of reasons why you might bail on something important because your life is full of something urgent.
I don't even keep track of days and I look at the calendar and weather every day, there's too much work and too little time.
We better start calling HN instaprogrammar.
For something you are _accused_ of doing, usually.
It's a little hard to pay attention to physical mail when you may be in a precarious housing situation, or un-housed.
> You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did
People get summons for all kinds of things, and being summoned doesn't have to mean you did something. Plenty of people get them for "loitering", the crime of having nowhere to go.
you have some evidence to support this? It is oddly authoritarian for HN...
Most people do something most days that could be legitimately ticketed or cited, if only a misdemeanor. The more interesting question is (at least statistically speaking) who actually gets them and why.
Maybe you're a one man crime spree, most people are not.
Driving traffic speed on a highway is usually a misdemeanor unless you live somewhere with reality-based speed limits.
Try giving an actual misdemeanor as an example.
In my jurisdiction smoking within a certain distance of certain government facilities (including the nondescript leased office that the registrar of deeds for my county is in, if the sign is to be beloved) is a misdemeanor (punishable by like a $50 fine or up to one night in jail IIRC).
I know for a fact that not getting certain kinds of municipal permits can be prosecuted as a misdemeanor around here and pretty much nobody gets permits for anything if the property is their primary residence (and the inspectors don't care).
Presumably we all have access to Google :)
> Unlike most states, Georgia has a very unique traffic code. Almost all traffic violations in Georgia are misdemeanors.
Emphasis added.
Moreover - it's been demonstrated repeatedly that no single person can possibly make a claim that they have not run afoul of SOME municipal, state or federal law, regulation, code, rule, etc in any given time period.
I'm known to my family as boring tame law & rule obeying buzz-kill, and I do not have anything remotely approaching the level of confidence and/or arrogance to make such a claim.
Did you ever roll through a stop sign without a complete stop or make a quick highway lane change without signaling? Reckless driving, up to officer discretion. Drove over the speed limit? Same goes many places.
Ever forget your wallet and drive without your license? Drive with slightly over a legal limit of alcohol (hard to judge correctly)? Cross over a signed private property you don't have permission to access?
Maybe you smoke and you are too close to a federal or state building access. Maybe your uncle gave you some hooch he made. Maybe you went to an unofficial nude beach.
Been "drunk/disorderly in public" ? Again officer discretion but could easily be applied to majority of people leaving a club most Friday nights.
Maybe you just live in a place where jaywalking is a misdemeanor.
Honestly the lists are long and convoluted, and in many cases the discretion left to LEO mean that nearly anyone could be written up for it. Which is sort of the point.
I’m not disagreeing with your overall point (although usually it’s expressed as people committing felonies every day) but these examples just aren’t making your point.
Interestingly, violating the public health orders here has been a misdemeanor, and it’s pretty easy to have accidentally violated one for a moment.
Regardless, the point stands I think. The point isn't that cops are handing out misdemeanors left and right, rather that it is fairly easy to dig around and find one that could be applied to nearly everyone.
No, no and no. All of those are serious misconducts that are rightfully punished. Stop signs exist for a reason. Signalling on a highway is very necessary to inform other drivers where you are intending to steer your heavy machine thats hurling down the street at speeds evolution didn't prepare us for. Every driver caught speeding who is punished for it is a win for society in my book.
> Ever forget your wallet and drive without your license? Drive with slightly over a legal limit of alcohol (hard to judge correctly)? Cross over a signed private property you don't have permission to access?
I don't know where you live, but driving without license results in either a verbal warning by the police or a ten buck fine if you're very unlucky. Anyways, I've never heard of anyone who ever got controlled for his drivers license so far. If you steer your car while drunk, you deserve to be punished. I don't care that you're in danger of an embarassing death by tree, but you're also endangering everyone around you. What do you expect from the police? To let that go unpunished?
Also why wouldn't you be punished for crossing private property without permission? If you had a lawn and some guys would come and walk across it every two hours, wouldn't you be pissed and expect some kind of retaliation for that?
> Maybe you smoke and you are too close to a federal or state building access. Maybe your uncle gave you some hooch he made. Maybe you went to an unofficial nude beach.
Smoking is known to cause cancer and is very unpleasant in general, even if it wouldn't. You may stick to your designated drug consumption spots for that matter, but if you decide its okay to annoy and poison the general public around you it's perfectly reasonable to punish you.
You don't go to an "unofficial" nude beach without knowing it's unofficial. You don't undress yourself in public. Therefore, you know you commited a crime because most others really don't want to see you naked.
> Been "drunk/disorderly in public" ? Again officer discretion but could easily be applied to majority of people leaving a club most Friday nights.
Good. I hate drunk mobs hanging around, yelling and being generally unpleasant for all others around them.
All cases you listed deserve punishment, especially the car related ones. Cars are no joke and should be treated with care and respect, not as reclessly as you seem to prefer it.
That you know of, or have been cited for.
To address the point at hand, if we're going to summon people to court it makes sense to communicate the information reliably.
Additionally, I would love for policing to be primarily focused on serious crimes and not minor nuisance crimes, of which the city and state codify a mind boggling number.
It starts with the word "legitimately". There's a good number of towns in North Florida under consent decree for financing themselves via tickets from motorists that are passing through. The towns set up speed limits on major roads that had nothing to do with road safety and everything with fleecing travelers. You'd also think that the local cops would try very hard not to stop anyone who looks as if they might attract the Fed's attention. That leaves the poor and indigent - business as usual.
Also in today's news: the DOJ reached a settlement with Purdue Pharma. Yes, totally legitimate, all within the confines of the law.
[1] https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/feb/16/us-murder...
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/fe... --- this blog post also gives an example of one of the more troubling barriers to court appearance: judges who close their courtrooms to non-defendants, meaning defendants without child care can't appear.
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107808741879177... --- ungated version: https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents...
[1] https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Criminal-Co...
[2] https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2006/new-york-city-adm...
I would not jump to conclusions about being sympathetic or not without knowing more about what is behind people acting this way though.
One guess I'd have is... well, the people entangled in the criminal justice system are largely an overrepresented subset of our population, the poor, who usually haven't just had ONE interaction with the criminal justice system. I'd guess that they may kind of give up and think no matter what they do they are screwed, it's all so incomprehensible and beurocratic anyway, the amount of effort they put in in the past (or have seen their peers put in) doesn't seem to be correlated to liklihood of good outcomes, and poor people are actually usually really busy trying to stay housed/fed/employed/sane/alive.
The way to find out, of course, is not guessing but talking to some people with court dates and people who have missed court dates.
What you (may) have read is an explanation of why the actual problem isn't one of laziness. You choose to dismiss that research which sought to solve the problem and attribute an entirely different, and unevidenced, cause. That type of assertional problem solving is part of why the underlyign problem continues to exist.
Reread yourself.
Your entire comment can be reduced to: "I believe that people are childish and unable to take life seriously".
The paper explores a different possibility for why defendants might miss court: simple human error. They then explore that theory and notice that by implementing ways to avoid this human error the failures to appear are lower. It also explores the theory that by shifting away from punitive attitudes (i.e. not blaming or punishing people) you lower this behavior.
Your comment is irrelevant to this discussion as it blames the victims of the system.
And your comment assumes the impossibility that these people are capable of being responsible and adhering to a summons. This stance is unscientific and ideologically driven.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the United States that prohibits employers from firing workers who have to appear in court. But I totally understand why "respecting the legitimacy of the courts," while nice in principle, doesn't match in comparison to putting food on the table.
You forget that you mostly deal with "normal" people. People with jobs, or friends, hobbies, etc. There is however, a surprisingly large class of people that aren't even remotely capable of the fairly rudimentary skill-set required to do something like: read a summons, understand that it says they have to go to court on a certain date, decide that they should in fact go, schedule that date and reserve the time to go, wake up on time, remember to go, find reliable transportation to get to court, find the court, figure out how to get into the building and through security, and figure out where to go once in the court building. Failing at any one of the steps in that chain means failing to appear. It may be hard to believe, but in my experience, there are actually a LOT of people for whom this sequence would be a pretty big stretch. Guess which segment of society makes up a disproportionate number of police encounters which will ultimately lead to a court summons?
Here's an even stickier question for you, now that we've wandered off the path. How do you feel about these people (I'll call them a basket of incapables) voting?
This is a good question , though not one which is too interesting. I think it's largely hypothetical since I believe voter turnout amongst the group I was speaking about would be abysmal. Nevertheless, I think I can answer definitively: I actually like the non-mandatory system America has, but I don't like the artificial impediments to voting that we've been seeing lately and for most of our history. So, in general, I would oppose almost any form of disenfranchisement, but I also don't really feel like someone that doesn't otherwise care enough to vote really needs to vote, or that they even should. ...and I'd oppose any form of mandatory voting like some nations have tried.
Interestingly, for much of my youth, I did not vote. Primarily, this was because I felt inadequately informed on the respective issues to be qualified to vote on them. I also felt like my opinion was too easily swayed and misled by information that wasn't in fact substantive at the end of the day.
I now vote, but I only fill out my ballot for issues which I feel I am informed enough to vote on. This means I usually only vote on 40-50% of the items on the ballot.
I think we all agree that's a separate question from what achieves the best outcomes as a matter of social policy.
>In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional.
It's exactly the opposite of your stance.
It's well-documented that in many ways, the USA has "criminalized" being poor. Not directly, of course, but indirectly.
I suspect OP would be entirely amenable to this line of reasoning, perhaps they'd be willing to read a bit on the topic.
For example:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/08/21/criminal...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison
But gosh, lets not attack and flag the comment.
OP, I've left my up-vote. Sorry the shame brigade got to it first, instead of anyone interested in a constructive dialogue.
The author said:
> totally not right that I'm being flagged for just having an unpopular opinion. I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone, or raising illegitimate points. Whoever is doing this is exactly falling into the behavior of trying to silence people you disagree with.
I couldn't agree more.
And as I said, I am not a fan of having an encounter with the justice system send you down a spiral of Kafka-esque inability to recover. Also, I fully agree that some (few!) jurisdictions turn the policing into a pseudo-revenue source, which is not reasonable and should be regulated against with sensible laws.
But my exactly related point is that at some stage of thinking, you will confront the question of "how hard do we have to keep on trying to make things easier for people to deal with the consequences of their actions?" And, what are we trying to get to as a goal?
We are not going to rid the world of crime. We are not going to be able to hand deliver people to court who forgot their court date. We are not going to be able to alleviate every person of the stresses in life that they encounter. How much should we do?
Of course we shouldn't put artificial barriers in people's way to trip them up. And if something is easy to help them avoid trouble, by all means. It's only in a government's interest not to cause people to spiral into criminality with no way out. It's a cost on society! You would be dumb not to see that.
As a middle class person, it's easy for me to say all this, yes. Admitted. But neither do I reflexively believe that "victim blaming" is a reasonable full excuse against all the trouble a person gets into in life.
Now, whether there is something systemic about our country, people, government, and the widening gulf between rich and poor (or in my words, people capable of getting through daily life successfully) is growing and increasingly causing more than some people can handle -- well, that is a bigger question that I don't know the answer to.
Still there's an incentive for everyone to keep these things from spiraling out of control no matter whose fault it is.
We should want some level of compliance here and avoid a legal system that then rolls out of control with minor offenses snowballing from failure to appear to serious life consequences stemming from, arrest, job loss and etc. Those situations impact everyone in society at some point, even if only in increased taxes.
These aren't super criminals, we want to process whatever has happened through the courts as efficiently as possible without it getting out of control.
Even if things spiraling out of control are their own bad choices, if we can prevent that it benefits everyone.
Just getting upset about them being "irresponsible" or not as it "ought" to be is unproductive pseudo-moralism (the distinction being that it is reasonable to require that for a set code to be considered moral it has to actually improve the situation in at least some sense or else it is irrelevant) it doesn't address either the root cause or the symptoms. Hammering them with hard consequences fails so continious nudging with trivialities shows better results for all involved even if it is a tacky and kind of weird stop-gap social work. Getting into the classic "if it looks stupid but works well it isn't stupid".