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Previous research has established the deleterious long-term effects of juvenile legal system involvement such as increased risk of criminal legal system involvement as adults. This paper examines retrospective accounts of how that process occurs by exploring the following research question: how does one's involvement in the juvenile legal system, which includes monetary sanctions, shape peoples' views of law and legal institutions and with what consequences? Based on 19 interviews with adults who have legal debt from both juvenile and criminal legal systems, the paper focuses on four aspects of the long-reaching effects of juvenile legal involvement and juvenile monetary sanctions: legal socialization, adultification, legal cynicism, and future aspirations. In all these aspects, we show the organizational constraints that shape individuals' perspectives about the law and the impact of monetary sanctions on their lives. In doing so, the paper shows how monetary sanctions associated with juvenile cases add to the cumulative disadvantage of legal system involvement.

Decades of significant crime declines and recent reductions in the number of people confined in prisons and jails in the United States have been accompanied by the emergence of new, and the resurgence of old, forms of punishment. One of these resurgent forms is the assessment of fines, fees, and costs to those who encounter the criminal legal system. Legal financial obligations (LFOs) have become widespread across the United States and are levied for offenses from alleged traffic violations in some states to felony convictions in others. Their emergence has been heralded by some as a less punitive alternative to spending time in prison or jail but recognized by others as uniquely consequential for people without the means to pay. Drawing on data from 254 counties in Texas, this article explores the emergence and enforcement of LFOs in Texas, where LFOs play a particularly prominent role in sanctions for alleged misdemeanor offenses and serve as an important source of revenue. Enforcement of LFOs varies geographically and is related to conservative politics and racial threat. We argue that LFOs are a defining feature of a contemporary punishment regime where racial injustice is fueled by economic inequality.

Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals' rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.

Low-level misdemeanor and traffic violations draw tens of millions of people into local courts to pay fines and fees each year, generating billions of dollars in revenue. We examine how standardized legal fines and fees for low-level charges induce disparate treatment and result in disparate impact. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates administrative court records as well as interviews with criminal defendants from Texas, we find that although the majority of defendants readily pay for and conclude their case, African American, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged defendants spend disproportionate amounts of money and time resolving theirs. Analysis of criminal case records illustrates the disparate impact of monetary sanctions through the accrual of debt and time spent resolving a charge. Interviews reveal irreconcilable tensions between American ideals of equality in sentencing and the meaning and value of money and time in an increasingly unequal society.

In this article, we explore the experiences of people who carry monetary sanction (or penal) debt across eight U.S. states. Using 519 interviews with people sentenced to fines and fees, we analyze the mental and emotional aspects of their experiences. Situating our analysis within research on the social determinants of health and the stress universe, we suggest that monetary sanctions create an overwhelmingly palpable sense of fear, frustration, anxiety, and despair. We theorize the ways in which monetary sanctions function as both acute and chronic health stressors for people who are unable to pay off their debts, highlight the mechanisms linking penal debt with mental and emotional burdens, and generalize our findings using national data from the U.S. Federal Reserve. We find that the system of monetary sanctions generates a great deal of stress and strain that becomes an internalized punishment affecting many realms of people's lives.

Although recent scholarship has enumerated many individual-level consequences of criminal legal citations and sentences involving fines and fees, we know surprisingly little about the structural consequences of monetary sanctions or legal financial obligations (LFOs). We use social disorganization and critical race theories to examine neighborhood-level associations between and among LFO sentence amounts, poverty, and racial and ethnic demographics. Using longitudinal data from the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts, and the American Community Survey, we find LFOs are more burdensome in high-poverty communities and of color, and that per-capita rates of LFOs sentenced are associated with increased future poverty rates across all neighborhoods.

Monetary sanctions are a common tool for enforcing accountability within the criminal justice system. However, it is unclear how individuals with disabilities who have a limited capacity to work interact with the system of monetary sanctions. Drawing on courtroom observations and interviews in Washington State, we find that although the court does take disability into account when imposing economic sanctions and monitoring payment compliance, individuals with disabilities end up in a perpetual cycle of administrative hearings that can result in serious financial and health consequences for those involved. Implications for findings are discussed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Over the last several decades, with the rise of mass incarceration in the United States and its steep costs, governments at the federal, state, and local levels have dramatically ramped up monetary punishment. Monetary sanctions are now the most common type of criminal penalty in the United States. The growth of fines, fees, and other legal financial obligations (LFOs), and the ensuing legal debt, reflect a shifting of the system's costs onto its primarily low-income and indigent subjects. This study provides an exploration of previously underexamined ways in which monetary sanctions impose distinct burdens on the poor. Interviews with 121 defendants in Texas and New York, along with courtroom observations, demonstrate that criminal legal debt is particularly challenging for people with low incomes in three meaningful ways. First, systems set up to handle indigency claims do not adequately address the needs or complex individual circumstances of those who simply do not have the ability to pay. Oftentimes, alternatives are unavailable or statutorily prohibited. Second, the lack of alternatives to payment lead to compromising situations, which then compel indigent defendants to make difficult choices about how to allocate scant resources. Finally, being encumbered with fines and fees and participating in alternatives like community service comes with taxing time requirements that can prove uniquely challenging for those who are poor. These three findings lead us to propose a series of policy recommendations revolving around three key themes: (a) enhancement of indigency procedures, (b) equity in monetary sanctions, and (c) alleviating burdens by improving accessibility., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The expansion of monetary sanctions constitutes what Beckett and Murakawa describe as the "shadow carceral state," where covert penal power is expanded through institutional annexation by blending civil, administrative, and criminal legal authority. A growing body of work on monetary sanctions has begun to dissect covert penal power by tracing increased civil and administrative pipelines to incarceration, civil financial alternatives to criminal sanctions, and innovations to generate criminal justice revenue. However, institutional annexation and innovation in the form of contemporary pay-to-stay practices remain understudied and undertheorized. In this article, I first examine statutes and practices to theorize pay-to-stay as exemplary of the shadow carceral state-an outcome of legal hybridity and institutional annexation legitimated using the legal construction of "not punishment," which frames monetary sanctions as non-punitive. Second, I expand Beckett and Murakawa's framework to argue pay-to-stay practices reveal how the shadow carceral state compounds or initiates the civil death of those charged. I broaden our notion of civil death to include financial indebtedness to the shadow carceral state. I suggest covert penal power expands through the accumulation of resources extracted from people marked for civil death through criminal justice contact. Finally, I conclude that monetary sanctions such as pay-to-stay reveal how the shadow carceral state expands covert penal power through necrocapitalism, meaning institutional accumulation occurs through dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Research on court-imposed monetary sanctions has not yet fully examined the impact that processes used to manage court debt have on individuals' lives. Drawing from both interviews and ethnographic data in Illinois and Washington State, we examine how the court's management of justice-related debt affect labor market experiences. We conceptualize these managerial practices as procedural pressure points or mechanisms embedded within these processes that strain individuals' ability to access and maintain stable employment. We find that, as a result, courts undermine their own goal of recouping costs and trap individuals in a cycle of court surveillance.

The Ferguson Report became a watershed moment for understanding the costs and consequences of the monetary sanctions system for communities of color. Since that time, myriad reports, studies, and commissions have uncovered evidence that suggests that Ferguson, Missouri, was not an outlier but rather part of a broader set of systems throughout the country that relied on increasingly punitive assessment and collection strategies for revenue. The growth and expansion of these systems continue to have detrimental and widespread consequences. In this article, we aim to shed light on the current state of monetary sanctions as the full scope and damage of the monetary sanctions system come better into focus on the national, state, and local level. We explore the legal challenges and legislative reforms that are attempting to reshape the landscape of monetary sanctions and lessen the burden on economically disadvantaged individuals and communities of color.

Monetary sanctions mandated in state statutes include fines, fees, restitution, and other legal costs imposed on persons convicted of crimes and other legal violations. Drawing on content analysis of current legislative statutes in Illinois pertaining to monetary sanctions, we ask three questions: What are defendants expected to pay for and why? What accommodations exist for defendants' poverty? What are the consequences for nonpayment? We find that neoliberal logics of personal responsibility and carceral expansion suffuse these laws, establishing a basis for transferring public costs onto criminal defendants, offering little relief for poverty, and supporting severe additional penalties for unpaid debt. Statutory inequality legally authorizes further impoverishment of the poor, thereby increasing inequality. Major related organizing and advocacy work, however, has created an opening for significant changes toward greater fairness.

This review assesses the current state of knowledge about monetary sanctions, e.g., fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, and any other financial liability related to contact with systems of justice, which are used more widely than prison, jail, probation, or parole in the United States. The review describes the most important consequences of the punishment of monetary sanctions in the United States, which include a significant capacity for exacerbating economic inequality by race, prolonged contact and involvement with the criminal justice system, driver's license suspension, voting restrictions, damaged credit, and incarceration. Given the lack of consistent laws and policies that govern monetary sanctions, jurisdictions vary greatly in their imposition, enforcement, and collection practices of fines, fees, court costs, and restitution. A review of federally collected data on monetary sanctions reveals that a lack of consistent and exhaustive measures of monetary sanctions presents a unique problem for tracking both the prevalence and amount of legal financial obligations (LFOs) over time. We conclude with promising directions for future research and policy on monetary sanctions.