Abstract
Objectives
The aims of this study are to test the effectiveness of court date reminders on failure to appear (FTA) and to test their effectiveness based on demographics and case characteristics.
Methods
Randomized controlled trial with four treatment groups: (1) no call; (2) reminder call made 3 days in advance of the appearance; (3) reminder call made the same day of the appearance; and (4) reminder call made both 3 days in advance and the same day. Participants included individuals released before their first appearance (arraignment) for which the provider had a phone number at which to make a reminder attempt. Some demographic information is available (race, sex, and age) and some case characteristics are available (the time from arrest to arraignment, and charges).
Results
Using an intent-to-treat (ITT) analysis, reminders reduced the FTA rate by 37%. The results suggest the timing of the reminders was not important. People of color benefited from the reminders more than white participants. Participants with a longer time between the arrest and the arraignment benefited more than participants with a shorter time between the arrest and arraignment.
Conclusions
Court-date reminders may reduce racial disparities in FTA rates. Future research should attempt to include measures of perceptions of procedural justice and other measures of socioeconomic status. The current study is limited by small disparities in intended and attempted treatment, and lack of data on perceptions of procedural justice, and socioeconomic status.
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Notes
On December 12, 2017, there was a technical glitch that resulted in a delay of the transfer of the files to the staff assigned to make phone calls. As a result, many participants scheduled to receive a same-day reminder call could not receive one. Thus, we have not included cases with arraignments scheduled on December 12 in the analysis. We conducted analyses with these cases included (both intent-to-treat and as-treated); their inclusion does not change any of the substantive findings. The issue was resolved within a few hours, so the three-day calls made on December 12 (for appearances on December 15) were not affected and thus those cases are retained.
The provider continued to provide live-call reminders to some individuals after the study and hired a vendor to provide robocalls to others.
Analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between the date of the appearance and the FTA rate, and the date of the appearance and treatment group to investigate whether the rate of treatment group selection affected outcomes. When appearance dates were coded based on the percentage of cases allocated to be in one of the three treatment groups, the analysis suggests the appearance date was a statistically significant predictor of treatment group selection. However, also when coded this way, the appearance date was not a statistically significant predictor of FTA.
The intervals were created by determining the quartiles across treatment groups for the number of days to arraignment, then rounding them to the next highest number of days that equaled a full week.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the vital contributions of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the live callers at The New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Aubrey Fox, Rick Peterson, Angela Tolosa, Wayne Nehwadowich, Richard Azzolino, and Evan Misshula.
Funding
The New York City Criminal Justice Agency is funded by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
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Ferri, R. The benefits of live court date reminder phone calls during pretrial case processing. J Exp Criminol 18, 149–169 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-020-09423-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-020-09423-0