Courts across the U.S. are finally beginning to adopt an easy fix to America’s epidemic of missed court appearances: text message reminders.
Counties in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have recently begun deploying reminder messages using the system Uptrust, and in the coming months, counties in Florida and Washington are expected to join them. The cost of each reminder message will be $.0075, according to The Boston Globe.
Penalties for defendants who miss court appearances are ghoulishly high — everything from heavy fines to the revocation of a driver’s license to up to a year in jail. In Baltimore, for instance, over 1,300 people each month are arrested for missing their day in court, and they face up to a month-long stint in jail.
That’s despite the fact that many missed court dates aren’t intentional. In an April 2017 report on pretrial detention, Human Rights Watch found that frequently, “defendants would miss misdemeanor court in the morning, but show up by the afternoon, after the judge has issued the warrant.” Scheduling conflicts are a commonly cited issue, as many defendants can’t afford to take time off work, but so is simply forgetting the court appointment.
Low-income Americans who often work multiple jobs are most at risk. “Poor people simply have more barriers to getting to court—transportation, childcare, health issues, can’t miss work. For extremely poor and homeless people, those barriers are multiplied,” John Raphling, a lead researcher on the Human Rights Watch study, told The Outline.
Though wealthier people tend to retain the services of lawyers who can simply attend court in their place, poor Americans who rely on public defenders do not have the same luxury. “Most public defenders do not allow 977 appearances," or appearances by a lawyer without the client present, Raphling said. Further, many public defenders lack the time to remind their clients about court dates.
In part because few counties have reminders of any sort, much less text reminders, the rates for missing court dates sit at around 20 percent for felony cases and, in some counties, at 57 percent for misdemeanors.
Studies have consistently found that reminders increase the number of people who show up to court. In New York, where four in ten people miss court dates for low-level offenses like littering, a January 2018 study concluded that text reminders slashed missed court appearances by 26 percent. That’s in line with the national consensus: according to Human Rights Watch, an Oregon study of reminder phone calls cut the failure-to-appear rate by 41 percent, and similar results came from experiments in Arizona and Colorado.
Reminders are not a panacea. One common reason that defendants miss their court dates is because they cannot afford the fines that many misdemeanors, like traffic arrests, carry. Nothing less than the abolition of court fines that criminalize the poor will solve that. Further, many low-income people do not own cell-phones — according to Pew, 8 percent of Americans earning less than $30,000 per year don’t. But an investment in reminder messages, including but not limited to text messages, is an essential first step. If even the DMV has implemented reminders before appointments, courts should be able to figure it out, too.
