[ A community organization created a web tool that simply reminds
people of their court dates. The impact is profound.]
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THE ALTERNATIVE TO CASH BAIL IS A SIMPLE REMINDER  
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Ramenda Cyrus
September 6, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ A community organization created a web tool that simply reminds
people of their court dates. The impact is profound. _

Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, operated by the Los Angeles
County Sheriff, on October 3, 2012., REED SAXON/AP PHOTO

 

Last March, the California Supreme Court ruled
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low-income individuals were not to be subject to cash bail, stating
that “conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford
bail is unconstitutional.” This came four months after a widely
scrutinized bail reform law subject to a referendum was defeated by
California voters
[[link removed](2020)] in
2020. 

Other states have moved even further to eliminate cash bail, part of
the growing national concern with how a de facto for-profit element of
the criminal justice system jails and immiserates people by the
millions, the vast majority of whom have not been convicted of a
crime. An Illinois bill
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2021 eliminates cash bail starting in 2023. In 2017, New Jersey
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bail in favor of giving judge's discretion on pretrial release.

Limiting and eliminating bail is a step in the right direction, but it
leaves questions about how the system will actually handle those who
enter it. The truth is that most people would prefer to attend their
court date than miss it. And studies
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shown that simply reminding people of when their court date is reduces
the amount of people who fail to appear (FTA).

_MORE FROM RAMENDA CYRUS_ [[link removed]]

Community-focused solutions like CourtReminders.org,
[[link removed]] which services Los Angeles County
and is run by the non-profit Fund For Guaranteed Income (F4GI)
[[link removed]], have the potential to reduce pre-trial
imprisonment, as well as the undue burden many individuals face when
presented with non-appearance marks on their records.

The tool, which is free and launched in July
[[link removed]], is
remarkably simple. Someone with a court date only has to put their
case number into the website, which will then look up the court date
on public records and send three reminders ahead of time. It is
designed to be accessible anywhere and to take the guesswork out of
when people need to get to court.

“How can we give people this obligation and not help them get there?
We’re saying it has dire consequences if you do not show up,” Nick
Salazar, chief operating officer at F4GI and the project developer for
CourtReminders.org, told me. “So why wouldn't we incentivize and
help people to make it to court, if that's what you want?”

Despite its simplicity, a court-reminder system has proven remarkably
effective in other instances. Reminders reduced FTAs by over 20
percent [[link removed]] in
New York, and a Nebraska study
[[link removed]] also
saw significant reductions when they tested a reminder
system. Postcards
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calls
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also been shown to be effective methods; in Los Angeles,
a robo-dialing system for traffic court
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FTAs by 22 percent. 

But the digital age calls for digital solutions. A website like
CourtReminders.org instituted in the largest county in America by
population could become a model for the country, as a simple, low-cost
way to give power back to people who would otherwise have no control
over their pre-trial fate.

A court-reminder system could help reduce prison overcrowding
[[link removed]]. As
the American Civil Liberties Union wrote
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incarceration caused by unaffordable bail is the single greatest
driver of convictions, and is responsible for the ballooning of our
nation’s jail and prison populations.” At the launch of
CourtReminders.org, pretrial detention made up 48 percent
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all incarcerated people in the L.A. County jail system, the largest in
the world.

People can miss court for a myriad of reasons, and most of the time it
is due to circumstances beyond their control.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative’s “Mass Incarceration:
The Whole Pie”
[[link removed]] report from 2022,
almost 550,000 people were awaiting trial in pre-trial detention in
local jails  last year, and 445,000 had not been convicted of a
crime. The majority of that detention is caused simply by
an inability to afford bail
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As PPI found [[link removed]],
the standard bail amount for felony charges is $10,000, and “most
people who are unable to meet bail fall within the poorest third of
society.” This is why the bail bond industry, where about 10
insurers control most of the underwriting
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is so massive.

Opponents of bail reform argue that people will fail to show up in
court without the threat of bail, or go on to commit crimes while
waiting for their court date. The latter possibility has been
demonstrated to be mostly untrue
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the former is often boosted by reports of FTA’s rise after bail
reform. As _The Appeal_
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using FTA rates as an indicator of the failure of bail reform
“obscures the fact that most people who miss court aren’t on the
run,” and how most are “vulnerable people in the criminal justice
system: poor, homeless, or mentally ill.”

As many have pointed out, people can miss court for a myriad of
reasons, and most of the time it is due to circumstances beyond their
control. Some cannot get time off of work, given that court is in
session in the middle of the work day. Others struggle to arrange
childcare and transportation. And like all humans, people awaiting
trial can sometimes just forget. Compounding this is the fact that
someone who is as little as five minutes late for a court date could
be cited for failure to appear and a warrant for their arrest. 

A failure to appear can be a devastating mark on someone’s record,
but it is remarkably easy to get one. And getting a bench warrant
issued and spending time in jail has been shown to disrupt a
person’s life in many ways: people can lose their children, their
jobs, and other opportunities.

Much of the merit that comes from CourtReminders.org is that it is a
community-developed tool. F4GI takes care to keep the website separate
from authorities, and does not collect any unnecessary or
incriminating information.

“The tool demonstrates what's possible when community-based
organizations demand a policy intervention proven to reduce
incarceration as well as design the path towards its
implementation,” Nika Soon-Shiong, executive director at F4GI, said
in a statement over email. “Courtreminders.org illustrates how silos
between community, for-profit prison industry telcos, law enforcement
agencies, and bureaucracies can and must be broken—as urgently as
the crisis of incarceration demands.”

_RAMENDA CYRUS is the John Lewis Writing Fellow at The American
Prospect._

* bail
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* detention alternatives
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* low income neighborhoods
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