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Pretrial - Court Date Notification

  • Juvenile Court Reminder Project (2008)

    "Over the years, Juvenile Court has called juveniles/parents scheduled on the next day’s arraignment calendars to remind them of their court date. These calendars included delinquency matters as well as petty misdemeanor and CHIPS issues of truancy and runaway cases. During lean economic times, the question becomes; does using personnel to call to remind litigants of their appearances make economic sense? In fact, at different times, this service has been cancelled when staffing has been limited. This study seeks to measure the effectiveness of the Juvenile Court arraignment calendar reminder calling for increasing the rates of appearance at arraignment hearings."

  • Reducing Courts’ Failure to Appear Rate: A Procedural Justice Approach (2011)

    "Failure-to-appear (FTA) is a significant problem in the nation’s courts. This paper examines the effectiveness of using different kinds of written reminders to reduce misdemeanants’ FTA rates. Misdemeanants (n = 7865) in 14 Nebraska counties were randomly assigned to one of four conditions prior to their court date: no reminder (control), reminder-only, reminder with information on the negative consequences of FTA (reminder-sanctions), or reminder with information on sanctions as well as the procedural justice benefits of appearing (reminder-combined). A subset of defendants (n = 452) was also surveyed after their scheduled court date to assess their perceptions of procedural fairness...

  • National Center for State Courts (NCSC) - Reminder Systems for Courts (2014)

    "Reminding people to appear at court or to make payments has achieved solid results. We will discuss the studies, some courts with systems, and a USA commercial service provider in this article."

  • Court date reminder text messages may be reducing failure to appear rates (2016)

    "In Dane County, individuals now have the opportunity to sign up for text message reminders to alert them about upcoming court dates, a strategy meant to decrease failure-to-appear rates.

    This recommendation was included in a report from a county Diversion Work Group, comprised of Dane County criminal justice officials and leaders of organizations that work with offenders, charged with reviewing all current adult and juvenile diversion programs. The system is meant to reduce the number of people not showing up for their court appearances."

  • The Court Messaging Project

    "We have begun to collect together reports, studies, articles & other research on how courts may reduce the rate of people failing to appear at their court hearings through reminder systems. Here are the resources we have found. Please send us other resources that you know of, through the comment box below or through email."