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High-profile police killings in the United States have drawn attention to how municipalities generate revenue through citations and arrests. This article investigates whether killings by police are more frequent in places that rely on fine-and-fee revenue by first describing the types of municipalities that collect the most money from monetary sanctions. It then analyzes whether fine-and-fee reliance and a municipality’s status as urban, suburban, or rural are associated with police killings. Descriptive statistics and negative binomial models reveal that suburbs with large Black populations rely the most on fine-and-fee revenue and police killings are higher in central cities than suburbs or rural towns. Cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models find that municipalities that rely more on fines and fees have more police killings, suggesting municipal fiscal imperatives influence police violence.

In the United States, legal financial obligations (LFOs) include many types of monetary sanctions. For example, fines are tied to specific offenses and imposed at conviction and fees charge people for the "use" of courts, prisons, and other public services. With the rise of mass incarceration, millions of people across the U.S. owe billions of dollars in LFOs. Yet despite the widespread use of monetary sanctions, it was not until the last decade that research began to uncover the vast system of LFOs embedded throughout U.S. laws and understand their far‐reaching socioeconomic consequences. This paper reviews recent research on LFOs across three areas: (1) the political development of LFOs, (2) their implementation and enforcement, and (3) the consequences of LFOs on people, broader social networks, and the functioning of public institutions. We conclude with recommendations for future research that explores the hidden processes connecting these three areas and accounts for the fractured nature of the U.S. government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-profile police killings in the United States have drawn attention to how municipalities generate revenue through citations and arrests. This article investigates whether killings by police are more frequent in places that rely on fine-and-fee revenue by first describing the types of municipalities that collect the most money from monetary sanctions. It then analyzes whether fine-and-fee reliance and a municipality’s status as urban, suburban, or rural are associated with police killings. Descriptive statistics and negative binomial models reveal that suburbs with large Black populations rely the most on fine-and- fee revenue and police killings are higher in central cities than suburbs or rural towns. Cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models find that municipalities that rely more on fines and fees have more police killings, suggesting municipal fiscal imperatives influence police violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Court-related debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Study participants were randomly selected to receive relief from all current and prior fines and fees assessed for criminal charges in the county. Fee relief reduced jail bookings 21 mo after randomization and the effect persisted over 44 mo of follow-up. Although fee relief reduced incarceration, financial sanctions had no effect on indicators of lawbreaking. Instead, the control group (who obtained no relief from fines and fees) were rearrested at significantly higher rates because of open arrest warrants for nonpayment. These results indicate the long-term and criminalizing effects of legal debt, supporting claims that financial sanctions disproportionately harm low-income defendants while contributing little to public safety., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

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.

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.

Consumer lore in the United States celebrates the automobile as a "freedom machine," consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility—the debt economy and the carceral state. Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated people, this article investigates this paradox in detail, tracing how the long arms of carcerality and debt operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. It describes the ways in which credit dovetails with capture—pretextual traffic stops, revenue policing from fines and fees, the overreach of automobile-related surveillance, the predatory auto loan and repossession businesses, and criminal justice debt—all shot through with profound racial bias. In the autocentric United States, transportation is a basic need, yet it has never been recognized or funded as a public good. As the "age of mobility" beckons, with autonomous driving as its technological centerpiece, the authors call for the social liberation of the automobile. From the outset, the automobile has traded on the romance of the open road, but it has too long served as a vehicle of inequality and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines taxation by citation—local governments using code enforcement and the justice system to raise revenue rather than solely to advance public health and safety. It does so through a detailed case study of Morrow, Riverdale, and Clarkston, three Georgia cities with a history of prolific revenue generation through fines and fees from traffic and other ordinance enforcement. Results suggest taxation by citation is a function of the perceived need for revenue and the ability to realize it through code enforcement. Moreover, the phenomenon may be a matter of systemic incentives. City leaders need not be motivated by simple rapaciousness. They may see fines and fees revenue as the answer to their cities' problems. Once in effect, the mechanisms necessary for taxation by citation—such as highly efficient court procedures—may stick, becoming business as usual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic stops and tickets often have far-reaching consequences for poor and marginalized communities, yet resulting fines and fees increasingly fund local court systems. This paper critically explores who bears the brunt of traffic fines and fees in Nevada, historically one of the fastest growing and increasingly diverse states in the nation, and one of thirteen US states to prosecute minor traffic violations as criminal misdemeanors rather than civil infractions. Drawing on legislative histories, we find that state legislators in Nevada increased fines and fees to raise revenues. Using descriptive statistics to analyze the 2012–2020 open arrest warrants extracted from the Las Vegas Municipal Court, we find that 58.6% of all open warrants are from failure to pay tickets owing to administrative-related offenses—vehicle registration and maintenance, no license or plates, or no insurance. Those issued warrants for failure to pay are disproportionately for people who are Black and from the poorest areas in the region. Ultimately, the Nevada system of monetary traffic sanctions criminalizes poverty and reinforces racial disparities.

(1) The increase in women’s mass incarceration over the past forty years raises questions about how justice-involved women experience the financial aspects of the criminal justice system. (2) We conducted in-depth interviews with twenty justice-involved women and seven criminal law and reentry professionals, and conducted courtroom observations in southeastern Pennsylvania. (3) The results from this exploratory research reveal that women’s roles as caregivers, their greater health needs, and higher likelihood of being poor creates barriers to paying fines and fees and exacerbates challenges in reentry. (4) These challenges contribute to a cycle of prolonged justice involvement and financial instability.

Probation officers have long had to balance social work and law enforcement orientations to meet the needs of the individuals on probation and to enforce the conditions of probation. In some jurisdictions, probation officers have a large responsibility in the collection and enforcement of probation fees. Little research has examined how that job function impacts the work of probation officers. The rehabilitative and punitive goals of probation may become secondary to the revenue generating goals. Transcripts of focus groups and interviews with 74 probation officers and managers in four probation jurisdictions in Texas were analyzed. The major finding was that, with a central focus on collections, probation officers risked moving away from an integrated social worker/law enforcer role focused on criminogenic needs, to being focused on revenue collection, thus making them akin to bill collectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The size, scope, and implications of the carceral state, particularly for urban communities of colour, are currently grossly underestimated. This article suggests the need to move beyond the traditional debate about mass incarceration in the US to show how the ubiquitous imposition of fines and fees for low-level offences has wide-reaching poverty-enhancing and racially disparate effects. The author argues that local government institutions such as the police and courts, which comprise the carceral state at neighbourhood level, engage in daily practices that reflect the colourblind racism of neoliberalism, including revenue-generation, which necessarily produce and reinforce race and class inequalities. The American state has always managed and controlled black labour; the author compares the imposition of fines and fees in the wake of black Emancipation and Jim Crowism to the current practice of fines and fees functioning within the paradigm of neoliberal colourblind racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) The increase in women's mass incarceration over the past forty years raises questions about how justice-involved women experience the financial aspects of the criminal justice system. (2) We conducted in-depth interviews with twenty justice-involved women and seven criminal law and reentry professionals, and conducted courtroom observations in southeastern Pennsylvania. (3) The results from this exploratory research reveal that women's roles as caregivers, their greater health needs, and higher likelihood of being poor creates barriers to paying fines and fees and exacerbates challenges in reentry. (4) These challenges contribute to a cycle of prolonged justice involvement and financial instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic stops and tickets often have far-reaching consequences for poor and marginalized communities, yet resulting fines and fees increasingly fund local court systems. This paper critically explores who bears the brunt of traffic fines and fees in Nevada, historically one of the fastest growing and increasingly diverse states in the nation, and one of thirteen US states to prosecute minor traffic violations as criminal misdemeanors rather than civil infractions. Drawing on legislative histories, we find that state legislators in Nevada increased fines and fees to raise revenues. Using descriptive statistics to analyze the 2012–2020 open arrest warrants extracted from the Las Vegas Municipal Court, we find that 58.6% of all open warrants are from failure to pay tickets owing to administrative-related offenses—vehicle registration and maintenance, no license or plates, or no insurance. Those issued warrants for failure to pay are disproportionately for people who are Black and from the poorest areas in the region. Ultimately, the Nevada system of monetary traffic sanctions criminalizes poverty and reinforces racial disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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.