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In the years since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, policymakers and advocates have pushed for reforms to both police practices and systems of fines and fees.  The connection between fines and fees enforcement tactics and police violence remains an important focus for reforms.  Police play a significant role in driving up the volume and amounts of fines and fees imposed, and they play a critical role in city and state collection efforts.  The use of police as debt imposers and collectors creates opportunities for police violence—both physical use of force, as well as more nuanced forms of violence through the exertion of coercion, fear, and control.  In this piece, I argue that specific policing tactics used to impose and collect fines and fees, and the wide latitude given to police via Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to engage in such tactics, facilitates conditions similar to those in Ferguson and results in unnecessary and oppressive police violence.  To combat this, I argue that fines and fees reforms must focus on the role of law enforcement in such systems, and how that role must be greatly limited to prevent additional violence.

Monetary sanctions include fines, fees, restitution, surcharges, interest, and other costs imposed on people who are convicted of crimes ranging from traffic violations to violent felonies.  We analyze how people in the court system theorize about monetary sanctions with regards to four kinds of justice: constitutional, retributive, procedural, and distributive justice.  Drawing on qualitative interviews with sixty-eight people sentenced to pay monetary sanctions in Illinois, we identify five themes that illuminate how respondents think about these forms of justice: monetary sanctions are: (1) justifiable punishment, (2) impossible to pay due to poverty, (3) double punishment, (4) extortion, and (5) collected by an opaque and greedy state.  We find that for defendants in the criminal justice system, monetary sanctions serve some retributive aims, but do not align with the other three domains of justice.  We discuss the policy implications of these findings.

Monetary sanctions have long been a part of the U.S. criminal justice system but have received increasing attention from the public as well as legal scholars and social science research in recent years. This essay describes initial findings from the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions, a multi-method study designed to build on the prior research on legal financial obligations (LFOs) by examining the multi-tiered systems of monetary sanctions operating within eight states representing key regions of the United States (California, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Texas and Washington). Our research explores the constantly changing legal environment and documents how the law is practiced on the ground. We expand on prior research by engaging a large and diverse group of people who owe legal debt and criminaljustice stakeholders. We augment these data with systematic court observations across different jurisdiction sizes and court levels. In doing so, we fill important gaps in the current understanding of U.S. systems of monetary and provide findings that can be used for guiding policy.

Although I have provided direct services and engaged in litigation related to municipal fines & fees in New York City, monetary sanctions are not my area of legal expertise.  Bearing that in mind, I am offering these thoughts in my capacity as a scholar of law, race, and money, and more importantly, as an organizer for economic justice.  I hope the essay facilitates constructive conversations about the frameworks we use to analyze the political economy of monetary sanctions and mass incarceration.  I am grateful to the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review and the organizers of “Progressing Reform of Fees and Fines: Towards A Research and Policy Agenda Conference”, hosted at Harvard Law School, for the opportunity to share these reflections.

Many municipal governments have come to depend heavily on fines and fees generated by the criminal justice system.  This essay uses data from all courts of limited jurisdiction (municipal and district courts) in Washington State between 2000 and 2014 to evaluate the relationships between local government finances, the Great Recession, and the imposition of debt through the criminal justice system.  I find that municipalities issued more criminal justice debt during and after the recession across Washington, but that government finances as measured by tax receipts and expenditures per capita were weakly related to sentencing practices.  These findings suggest that macroeconomic fiscal pressures may be drivers of enforcement and prosecutorial practices through increasing case volumes, but that macroeconomic pressures and local fiscal pressures did not appear to shift court sentencing practices in Washington during the Great Recession.