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Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court
- paxys 6y agoCan we please do parking signs next?
- Cactus2018 6y agoRelated analysis of open data: "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-systematically-ticketing-legally https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/144197004989/the-nypd-was-s...
- Cactus2018 6y agoAnd the partner post "Success: How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year" https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/87573867759/success-how-nyc-open-data-and-reddit-saved-new https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/87573867759/success-how-nyc...
- tehwebguy 6y agoLove it when a bunch of people get paid by the state to put on matching uniforms, go out into the streets strapped with guns & handcuffs and straight up extort millions of dollars from everyday citizens for legally parking (with virtual immunity from prosecution).
- InitialLastName 6y agoNot to mention "while exempting themselves and their friends from repercussions for parking illegally".
- benologist 6y agoI wish the technology existed so they could just correctly bill you when you get back to your car and you drive away with a receipt instead of a fine... the idea that you have done something wrong and you deserve a financial punishment for it is ludicrous.
- djmips 6y agoThis is in the same vein as the trial services that start billing you if you forget to cancel. I'd like to see the model for parking but I bet it turns out it contributes a lot to the bottom line so they don't want to change it.
- velosol 6y agoCopenhagen (among other places) has a pretty convenient app-based model for parking. You use one of a few competing apps on your phone and enter your car's registration plate. When you park you open the app and it pulls location and starts a timer. You pick an amount of time you'll be parked but the apps I've used have reminders and you can trivially extend parking as you feel appropriate. 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.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
- kritiko 6y agoParking enforcement generally doesn't have guns & handcuffs, in my experience.
- rossjudson 6y agoThey do when you want to make a point more than you want to be truthful. I mean, truth...who cares, right?
- tehwebguy 6y agoSome jurisdictions here exclusively use non-armed officers to issue parking tickets but rest just use the cops. 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.
- redthrow 6y agoMaybe you can contribute to To Park Or Not To Park? https://toparkornottopark.com/about https://toparkornottopark.com/about
- BurningFrog 6y agoIt doesn't help revenue generation for you to understand the signs though.
- ciarannolan 6y agoNYC also offers tickets to baseball games and fast food gift cards to try to get people to show up for court. > 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-tickets-doughnut-gift-cards-to-get-freed-inmates-back-in-court-after-state-ends-cash-bail/ https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/11/04/nyc-to-offer-mets-ti...
- selectodude 6y ago>Mets baseball tickets I'm definitely skipping bail then.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago:) My first thought on reading that was also very much that the listed incentives would vary in effectiveness...
- InitialLastName 6y agoThose are frequently free anyway.
- dudyddfrdf 6y agoI'd be outraged if I was a New York tax payer and read that. Fuck handouts for people who can't even exert a modicum of responsibility.
- kyleblarson 6y agoI'm not so sure that people with pending criminal cases giving police their cell number is such a great idea. It's basically saying 'please track me'.
- colinmhayes 6y agoThey already have all your information and are tracking you.
- aaaxyz 6y agoI'm sure that's true if you're a high-level criminal, but I doubt they bother doing that for traffic infractions or minor crimes. 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).
- colinmhayes 6y agoNYPD has Clearview. They've got all the data about everyone, including your friends, job, and yes, name + phone number.
- akiselev 6y agoAlmost anyone with a law degree can get access to LexisNexis or any number of databases that slurp data from public and private source so people can deliver their court summons, lawsuits, etc. If it hit a big company's database somewhere, it's probably included. Any police department without access to such a data source already is too small or incompetent to put it to use.
- rootusrootus 6y agoMost of that aside from job you can get totally free at places like truepeoplesearch. Creepy but they are pretty thorough.
- kepler1 6y agoI'm all for decreasing people's unnecessary trouble with the justice system. 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.
- anoncake 6y agoPeople who can't get their lives together are more likely to be summoned to court to start with.
- spyspy 6y agoIt sounds like you're not really for decreasing people's trouble with the justice system if you're going to dismiss them all as just stupid and lazy.
- Swizec 6y agoOr they have 5 jobs at 20h each so they can support their kids. Or mental health problems. Or drug issues. Or dying parents they’re taking care of. Or all of the above. Lots of reasons why you might bail on something important because your life is full of something urgent.
- devwastaken 6y agoBelieve it or not many people work a job and that job is manual labor, where you have to lose yourself in time and not think too hard about your position in life and things you have to do or else it reminds you how caught in the gears of the system you are. And then a court date passes by like any other day. 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.
- bitwize 6y agoScientists naïvely try to help people, thinking they are improving things, blissfully unaware that the criminal justice system is functioning as intended and serving its goals of putting minorities and other undesirables behind bars.
- loa_in_ 6y agoAnyone, to fill the quotas
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoThat quota thing only exists in large metropolitan coastal cities. I assure you, that does not happen in the majority of the US. I mean my state let's people drive with like 5 dui's on record.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoWhile I applaud the sentiment I think we should remember it only takes a couple authoritarians in the bureaucracy to turn a "here's an incentive to show up" type cost into a "here's an extra fine, you get half the money back when you show up" revenue stream.
- jjoonathan 6y agoDon't forget the third party to "administer" the fine and take a cut!
- dragonwriter 6y agoThat's literally the status quo bail bonds system.
- lazyasciiart 6y agoSurprisingly enough, some states in the US have ended third party bail systems - https://bondjamesbondinc.com/bail-bonds/do-all-states-allow-bail-bonds/ https://bondjamesbondinc.com/bail-bonds/do-all-states-allow-...
- jjoonathan 6y agoNice!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- coderintherye 6y agoUptrust is doing great work in this regard: https://www.uptrust.co https://www.uptrust.co There is a lot of potential to make local government systems work better for all of their constituents, including those facing court appearances.
- jdxcode 6y agoconsidering it's called "corrections" you'd think there would be more focus on making it as easy as possible for the people we want to improve
- nickff 6y agoThat's just a euphemism, like 'department of defense', 'homeland security', or for the cynics out there 'department of education'.
- irrational 6y agoCentral Intelligence Agency, center for disease control.
- Lammy 6y agoI wish instead to live in a society that doesn’t have low-level court appearances to incentivize.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> I wish instead to live in a society that doesn’t have low-level court appearances to incentivize. 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.
- Lammy 6y agoThat's almost exactly the opposite of what I had in mind. I don't believe in "low-level offenses" as anything but tools to perpetuate inequality and would love to see the concept eliminated. Any offense benign enough to be considered "low-level" is not indicative of bad intention to me, because I assume any person choosing to do evil will go big or go home :)
- praxulus 6y agoWhat should we do about actions that aren't malicious, but are nevertheless harmful or put others at risk? Littering, mild traffic violations, etc.
- Lammy 6y agoWe should enrich everybody. All of those examples are symptoms of people short on time, which in our society is usually synonymous with short on money. I don't think many people would choose to drive recklessly while eating and tossing their trash out the window. That's something I'd expect from a person who has to be at work at EARLY:00 on-the-dot, maybe working multiple jobs, but generally just trying to survive another day.
- bawolff 6y ago
- nimbius 6y agoDisclosure: 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.
- darawk 6y agoI'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.
- kbos87 6y agoHaving 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.
- growlix 6y agoThe effect of the nudge is definitely the main story here, but the redesigned summons form (Figure 1) seems like a pretty good example of the importance of communication design. While there's certainly still room for improvement, the new forms seem much easier to understand.