New York Moved the Court Date to the Top of the Summons and Missed Hearings Fell
Fishbane, Ouss and Shah (Science, 2020) tested a redesigned New York City criminal summons and text reminders. The new form cut failures to appear by 6.4 points; the best text set by 10.
In this article6 sections
The old New York City criminal summons held everything a defendant needed to avoid an arrest warrant, and held it where few would look. Moving the court date, time, location and the consequence of missing court to the top of the form, and later texting people before the hearing, reduced failures to appear in two field experiments (Fishbane, Ouss and Shah, Science, October 2020). Per J-PAL’s summary, the redesigned form cut failures to appear by 6.4 percentage points from a 41% baseline, any pre-court text cut them by 8 points (21%), and the best message set by 10 points (26%) from a 38% baseline. The paper’s abstract puts the policy effect at 30,000 fewer arrest warrants.
What changed on the form and in the messages
The form redesign was a change of order. The text experiment covered roughly 20,000 summons recipients who had given a cell phone number, between March and June 2016, and the comparison group got no messages. The others received pre-court consequence messages (“Show up to avoid an arrest warrant”), plan-making prompts, or a combination, and some groups also got follow-up messages after a missed hearing. The combination set did best.
Three things a reader can take from it
- Put the action at the top. The old form held the facts, and moving them was enough to shift behavior across a city.
- Send the message near the event. A summons can be issued months before a hearing, and a text just before it does the remembering.
- Pair the consequence with a plan. The best-performing set combined both, so a reminder that only warns leaves some of the effect unclaimed.
The same logic fits a night-before message to yourself or to a friend: the time and place first, the reason it matters second. What to put in a text before you snooze covers the wording, and a London hospital trial that put a price in the reminder tested a related lever.
Frequently asked questions
Who ran the New York summons study and where did it appear?
Alissa Fishbane of ideas42, Aurélie Ouss of the University of Pennsylvania and Anuj Shah of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with colleagues. The paper, “Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court”, appeared in Science in October 2020.
Which text messages worked best?
J-PAL’s summary describes pre-court consequence messages (for example, “Show up to avoid an arrest warrant”), plan-making messages and combinations of the two. The best set, Group A, a combination of plan-making and consequences, cut failures to appear by 10 percentage points, a 26% decrease.
Could everyone in the city be texted?
Only a minority gave a phone number: J-PAL reports that about 13% of summons recipients provide one, so the text effects describe people who gave a number. The text experiment drew on roughly 20,000 such recipients, with phone numbers collected between March and June 2016.