Can transportation subsidies reduce failures to appear in criminal court? Evidence from a pilot randomized controlled trial

Rebecca Brough, Matthew Freedman, Daniel E. Ho and David Phillips

Economics Letters, 2022, vol. 216, issue C

Abstract: The failure to appear (FTA) for a scheduled court hearing can have serious consequences for a criminal defendant. Many have speculated that transportation is a material barrier to court appearance. We provide evidence from the first randomized controlled trial of transportation subsidies to reduce FTAs, conducted jointly with public defenders and the transportation authority in Seattle, Washington. The most intensive intervention was a transit card providing 2–3 months of free public transportation. While the experiment is underpowered due to COVID-19 disruptions, our pilot results allow us to bound the treatment effect and derive estimates of cost effectiveness under alternative assumptions. Our results suggest that transportation subsidies alone do not have large benefits for this aspect of criminal justice.

Keywords: Failure to appear; Criminal justice; Public defense; Transportation subsidies; Public transit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K41 K42 R41 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176522001501
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:216:y:2022:i:c:s0165176522001501

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110540

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().