Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

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Disclosure: ive been incarcerated for a drug crime in the past.

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.

I'm sure all these things are factors, but the text messages reduced rates of failure to appear, so...clearly ignorance and apathy are part of the equation.

Having someone in my life who I could easily see falling into the bucket we are labeling “ignorant and/or apathetic”, I’d say there could also be less cynical reasons why people fall into this trap.

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.

Sure, but I don't think anyone is pretending that it's all we need. There is a subset of the population who isn't showing up because they forget. For them, text messages are helpful, and for everyone else they're non-harmful, so it's a net win. It doesn't mean that we stop looking for ways to improve things for everyone else.

> anxiety, depression, and a general sense of hopelessness against a system you’ve maybe been treated unfairly by in the past

That all counts as "apathetic" as I'd use the word.

That’s not a very discerning application of that word.

Or people that live busy lives benefit from nudges in the same way calendar notifications are a feature for almost any calendar app for otherwise perspicacious people.

Everything you said is true; making the summons more understandable and reminding people will not solve the structural issues that effectively criminalize poverty in America.

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.

You could definitely start a non-profit building a site for helping people with this problem. Here's the idea: you have a court date, you can submit documentation to the service, and it will try to automatically purchase an uber for you wherever your location is. You could setup a profile ahead of time so all information can be verified and let people who need to get to the court decide on when/where to schedule their car. As I'm sure you're well aware of, this would mean having to be a little more flexible since the location where they would be picked up may not be easily predicted depending on the day. This is an interesting technical and UI/UX problem!

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.

If someone is not responsible enough to appear for their court date (for whatever reason) then maybe they shouldn't be released on bail in the first place.

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