--- title: Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court description: Jennifer Doleac argues that a simple text message can help give people a chance to avoid getting pulled further into the criminal justice system. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/ author: Jennifer Doleac article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-03-21T10:00:04.028Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-21T10:00:04.250Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court og:description: Jennifer Doleac argues that a simple text message can help give people a chance to avoid getting pulled further into the criminal justice system. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfc87106a965ba0e4/69bd90da81006166146c054f/AmericansCourt.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: AmericansCourt.png og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court twitter:description: Jennifer Doleac argues that a simple text message can help give people a chance to avoid getting pulled further into the criminal justice system. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfc87106a965ba0e4/69bd90da81006166146c054f/AmericansCourt.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- # Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court Mar 21, 2026 10:00 AM UTC  Photo-illustration by TIME (Source: gorodenkoff/Getty) by [Jennifer Doleac](https://time.com/author/jennifer-doleac/) ## Jennifer Doleac Mar 21, 2026 10:00 AM UTC When people are accused of breaking the law—from something minor like trespassing to a more serious offense like robbery—the next step is typically a court hearing. This is the beginning of the process to determine whether they are guilty, and if so, what the consequences will be. Getting people to show up in court is a difficult challenge. We need to persuade someone who is accused of breaking the law to take time out of their life to face the consequences—not a pleasant task. It’s probably not surprising, then, that many miss their court hearings. What can we do about this? The standard approach in the U.S. is to lock people up, requiring cash bail for release. About [30%](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html#slideshows/slideshow1/2) of people currently incarcerated in the U.S. haven’t been convicted yet—they are simply in jail awaiting trial. Cash bail entails paying part or all of the bail amount so that a defendant can go home; if they show up in court, they will get most of that amount back. Of course, low-income defendants are less able to pay, which means this system often [punishes poverty](https://time.com/5749542/cash-bail-impact/). A major barrier to reforming the status quo is that people worry that defendants can’t be trusted to show up for their hearings and face punishment without these measures. The legal system provides big incentives to show up for your court date. If you miss it, not only will you lose any money you put down as bail, but the court will typically grant a warrant for your arrest, and you could face new, often more serious charges. It could also mean more severe consequences if you’re ever arrested for another offense: since courts consider past “failures to appear” (FTAs) when deciding whether someone is a flight risk, missing a hearing today can mean pretrial detention (time in jail) in future cases. The best data suggest that [23%](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/prfdsc.pdf) of felony defendants who are released pretrial still don’t show up for court, for a variety of reasons. When you speak with people who have been tied up in the American justice system, these reasons come to light. “Transportation is an issue. I have no license, and I always need to get a ride to court. It can take two or three hours sometimes because I need to find someone to take me there. And then it takes time to actually get into the courthouse with all the screening. Transportation and getting in are problems for me,” a woman named Rochelle told interviewers in 2023, as part of a [project](https://justicesystempartners.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/SJC-Lake-County-Getting-to-Court-as-Scheduled-Reframing-Failure-to-Appear.pdf) to understand FTAs in Lake County, Illinois. Omar, a man interviewed as part of the same project, recalled, “I had rented a room, but then moved to another apartment. I was working the night shift and my wife recently was diagnosed with cancer. My daily schedule was really busy and I had also misscheduled my court dates. Honestly, court is a big priority for me, but I couldn’t keep up with my other responsibilities and schedules.” Jamel also remembered making a strategic choice to skip his hearing after he was unable to reschedule it. “I was charged with a stupid nonviolent misdemeanor. My attorney begged to reschedule my dates due to my home/family responsibilities. Nope,” he shared. “My wife just had eye surgery and couldn’t care for herself, and our son has autism. I had to care for my family. I am the breadwinner. That misdemeanor charge wasn’t important enough and the judge wasn’t working with me. It wasn’t important enough for me to turn myself in—I stayed out to make money for my family.” And some people miss their hearings for very human but perhaps less sympathetic reasons. “My judge intimidates me and made me cry at the last hearing. It is not pleasant to attend court with that judge,” another interviewee, Candace, said. If FTAs are high for all these reasons, even with severe consequences hanging over people’s heads, it might seem that FTAs are inevitable, and locking people up until their case is resolved is the only way to ensure that our criminal justice system functions smoothly. That’s not good, given substantial [evidence](http://www.econweb.umd.edu/~pope/pretrial%5Fpaper.pdf) that being detained pretrial causes higher recidivism in the future. People lose their jobs and income, and they are more likely to plead guilty to the current charge because they’re so desperate to get out of jail. This all creates a vicious, costly cycle. Is it really necessary? Maybe not. What if, for people like Rochelle and Omar, skipping a court date wasn’t intentional? What if some defendants who don’t show up for their hearing aren’t actively avoiding the consequences of their actions, they simply didn’t know they had a court date, or hadn’t made plans to get there? Perhaps others, like Jamel, and Candace, who made a conscious choice to skip their hearing, didn’t know the extent of the consequences they would face by doing so. Is there something we could do to reduce FTAs among these groups? Alissa Fishbane, a researcher at the nonprofit organization deas42; Aurelie Ouss, an economist and criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania; and Anuj Shah, a psychology professor at Princeton University, also had these questions. They worked with New York City to try something new: redesigning the summons forms given to lawbreakers, and then sending text message reminders of upcoming court dates. In New York City, summonses are essentially tickets, given for very low-level offenses like cannabis possession, breaking open-container laws (drinking in public), and trespassing in a park after hours. The consequences for such offenses would typically be a fine, not jail time. But people who get a summons do need to attend a court hearing to have their case resolved. In New York City, about [40%](https://www.ideas42.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Using-Behavioral-Science-to-Improve-Criminal-Justice-Outcomes.pdf#:~:text=offenses%20in%20New%20York%20City%20%28NYC%29%20had,in%20the%20issuance%20of%20an%20arrest%20warrant.) of all defendants issued a summons missed these hearings. For many, this escalates their low-level, low-consequence offense to an arrest warrant and jail time. What had summons forms looked like in the past? To the researchers—and even to criminal justice professionals—they were unnecessarily confusing. “It was as if the thing was written in Gothic German,” Liz Glazer, the director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, said at the time. Key information—where and when you were required to show up for your hearing—was buried amid other fine print. Even more concerning, the main consequence for missing that hearing (an arrest warrant) was mentioned only on the back of the form. It’s possible that many people missed their court dates because they didn’t know about them, or because they didn’t think those hearings were a big deal. Attention is costly, and people often are not paying attention, especially if they have other problems to deal with. Redesigning these forms so that the key information was highlighted at the top was a priority for this research team. The researchers also wanted to see whether text messages could make this information more salient. Not everyone gave police officers a phone number when they were issued a summons, but those who did could receive text messages reminding them about their hearings. Some of those messages mentioned that the defendant would face an arrest warrant if they did not show up; others encouraged them to put the court date on their calendars and make a plan to get to the courthouse that day. Because these researchers are social scientists, they didn’t just want to make changes—they wanted to see whether these changes worked. To measure the causal effects of these changes, we again need an experiment—something that separates people into similar treatment and control groups. The ideal experiment would randomize who received the old versus the new summons forms, and whether they received text messages. For the summons forms, they took advantage of the fact that those forms come on a pad, and police officers go through the entire pad until they run out. When they run out, they get a new pad of forms. This will naturally happen at different times for different officers—in a way that creates as-if-random variation in the exact date that a police officer switched from the old summons forms to the new, redesigned forms. Similar people issued summonses just days apart, by the same police officer, would be given different forms. Other people issued summonses on the same day, from different officers, might receive different forms as well. The researchers then used this variation when individual officers began using the new forms as a natural experiment, to see what happened to FTAs for those who received old versus new summons forms. At the time, Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill was optimistic about the impact this would have: “Any measure that can help to expedite the disposition of summonses will add to the efficiency of the system and benefit everyone involved in the process.” Was he right? The researchers found that those who received the new, redesigned summons form were six percentage points less likely to miss their court hearings. This represents a 13% reduction in FTAs—a huge effect for such a small change. For the text message reminders, they were able to use a more classic, randomized controlled trial (RCT). Starting with all the defendants who gave police their phone number, they randomly assigned defendants into four groups: 25% received text messages that mentioned an arrest warrant, 25% received text messages that encouraged people to make a plan to get to the courthouse that day, 25% received messages that did both, and the remaining 25% of defendants were in the control group that did not receive any text messages. Measuring the causal effects of those text messages was then straightforward: the researchers could simply compare outcomes across the groups. Only 62% of defendants in the control group showed up in court for their hearings; sending any text message increased this number to 70%—a 13%improvement. This difference was largest for those who received text messages mentioning an arrest warrant, which suggests that some people had not responded to this incentive before because they simply didn’t know about it. What about the costs? Redesigning the summons forms required some time and effort up front, but printing the new forms wasn’t any more expensive than printing the old forms. Thus, the average cost of that intervention, over all defendants, was close to zero. Text messages aren’t free, but they are cheap—less than a penny per message sent. These small changes won’t eliminate FTAs, of course—plenty of defendants will still miss their hearings, and pretrial detention will still be necessary in many cases. But simply making information about those hearings—and the consequences for missing them—clearer helps a surprising number of people avoid warrants and new charges due to FTAs. It gives people a second chance to avoid getting pulled further into the criminal justice system. _Adapted with permission from_ [The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250886286/thescienceofsecondchances/) _by Jennifer Doleac._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/"},"headline":"Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court","datePublished":"2026-03-21T10:00:04.028Z","dateModified":"2026-03-21T10:00:04.250Z","description":"Jennifer Doleac argues that a simple text message can help give people a chance to avoid getting pulled further into the criminal justice system.","url":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/","keywords":["Weekend Essay"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfc87106a965ba0e4/69bd90da81006166146c054f/AmericansCourt.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jennifer Doleac","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/jennifer-doleac/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfc87106a965ba0e4/69bd90da81006166146c054f/AmericansCourt.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"AmericansCourt.png","caption":"","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/weekend-essay/","name":"Weekend Essay"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/why-so-many-americans-miss-their-day-in-court/","name":"Why So Many Americans Miss Their Day in Court"}}]}] ```