Sorry, Wrong Number: Tracking Court Attendance Targeting Through Testing a “Nudge” Text

Abstract

Will sending defendants text messages reminding them that they are due at court, the day before, cause more defendants to attend the first scheduled Magistrate’s Court hearing? The study universe included all 946 defendants in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight sent a postal requisition requiring them to attend court, who also had a mobile phone number, between January and June 2017. Two outcomes were then tracked: court attendance and fail-to-appear warrants. The experiment randomly assigned defendants at the point of postal requisition creation into the control group (n = 472), which received the standard postal approach, or the experimental treatment group (n = 474), which was sent a prescribed text message on the day before the court appearance. An intention to treat methodology was adopted, with a treatment integrity rate of 97% achieved. Post-experimental phone calls tracked the accuracy of 300 of the text numbers used across both experimental and control groups. No statistically significant effect of text messages was found on either attendance at court (OR 1.06, p = 0.661) or fail-to-appear warrants issued (OR 1.106, p = 0.512). Sub-group moderator analyses were conducted by age, distance from home to court, prior history of failure to appear, and investigator contact with defendants. No sub-group showed statistically significant differences in either outcome. The post-experimental survey of phone number quality in a random sample of 300 numbers from both groups found 62% were either invalid (uncontactable) or confirmed as not being valid for the defendant. Reanalysis limited to the sub-sample of the 112 accurate numbers found that text messages had produced a promising but non-significant boost in court attendance rates. “Nudge Texts” may be able to boost court attendance, but only if the accuracy of phone numbers used is assured in advance of sending the text messages.