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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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People convicted of crime are often treated as atomistic individuals by the criminal justice system, ignoring the fact that they are largely embedded in social networks. Research shows that family members are often negatively impacted by their relatives’ punishment despite not breaking any laws themselves. These detrimental effects of punishment on family are known as symbiotic harms. Most research on symbiotic harms, however, has focused on incarceration. We extend this research by describing how monetary sanctions harm the families of adults with legal debt. Our data come from semi-structured interviews with 140 people with legal debt and ninety-six court actors in Georgia and Missouri. We find evidence that family members are often coerced into paying their relatives’ fines and fees and that monetary sanctions increase the financial strain, emotional distress, and interpersonal conflict that relatives experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Native Americans are disproportionately affected by the criminal legal system, yet comparative analyses of criminal legal outcomes and experiences among racial and ethnic groups rarely center the experiences of Native Americans. This multimethod study examines how monetary sanctions are affecting Native American populations in Minnesota. Drawing on administrative criminal court data and qualitative fieldwork, we find that Native Americans are subject to among the largest overall legal financial obligations (LFOs) in criminal court and carry the largest average LFO debt loads relative to other racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota, particularly when proximal to tribal lands. Moreover, monetary sanctions exacerbate existing poverty and spatial isolation in rural areas, compounding and further entrenching historical, systemic disadvantages that Native communities already face. We contextualize these findings within the broader history of U.S. settler colonialism, resource extraction, and dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probation is the most commonly imposed correctional sanction, is often accompanied by supplementary costs, and can be operated by the state or private companies. Private probation is a unique sanction used in lower courts, most often for misdemeanor offenses, and is managed by third-party actors. We focus on documenting the process and unique costs of private probation, including the rituals of compliance and proportionality of punishment. We use data from interviews with individuals on private probation and local criminal justice officials as well as evidence from court ethnographies in Georgia and Missouri. For individuals on private probation, payment of monetary sanctions is a crucial way of demonstrating compliance. Yet the financial burden of added costs for supervision and monitoring creates substantial challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations in Ferguson, Missouri, revealed that many individuals, particularly Black people, entered the criminal justice system for relatively minor offenses, missed court appearances, or failure to pay fines. Municipal courts were focused on revenue generation, which led to aggressive enforcement of municipal codes. Although subsequent reforms were passed, little is known about whether and how the legislative changes influenced the law-in-action in the municipal courts. Using data from qualitative interviews with St. Louis area residents and regional court actors, as well as court observations, this article documents the legal structure of municipal courts in the region after Ferguson. We address how the parochial nature of municipal courts in St. Louis County perpetuates the financial marginalization of residents through the layering of punishment, and how the state legal structure further facilitates control, even after reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal governance has become a defining feature of our social world, fast‐tracking the commodification of human interaction, particularly within capitalist economies. Neoliberalism's intensification of capitalist social relations shifted social institutions such as education, healthcare, and criminal justice to resemble profit‐oriented enterprises. A preeminent consequence of this shift for the administration of criminal justice is the rapid expansion of monetary sanctions in the form of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our article contributes to scholarship on neoliberal governance and social institutions by exploring how lawmakers justify and frame the imposition and recoupment of pay‐to‐stay fees. We draw from a novel dataset compiled by the authors on pay‐to stay in the state of Illinois, which consists of state‐level pay‐to‐stay statutes, transcripts of legislative debates on the ratification of pay‐to‐stay statutes, and 102 civil complaints from 1997 to 2015 initiated on behalf of the Illinois Department of Corrections against currently and formerly incarcerated people to compel the payment of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our analysis suggests that in the era of neoliberal governance, consumerism is an institutional logic that lawmakers draw from to adopt pay‐to‐stay as a legal template in an effort to foster a producer–consumer relationship between incarcerated people and the state, thereby producing incarceration as a public commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary sanctions levied on individuals on probation and parole may dramatically influence their ability to reintegrate into the community and to complete their community supervision. Yet very little work has empirically assessed how agencies respond to these obligations. This is critical, given that individuals under community supervision occupy a liminal space: free in the community yet often at risk of violation, rearrest, additional fines, or re-incarceration. In this article, we introduce an approach to the collection and management of monetary sanctions by an adult probation and parole agency in one Pennsylvania county. This specialized department focuses solely on repayment of fines, fees, and costs for a subset of probationers and parolees who have completed all other supervision requirements. We complement the conceptual overview by presenting administrative data on this caseload (N = 5,811) to describe the population under supervision and assess the factors associated with debt amount, having difficulty with repayment, and being the subject of an enforcement action for non-payment. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this model compared with historical and other existing models of debt enforcement during community supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system are legally and procedurally complex. If not paid in a timely manner, a single conviction can result in multiple legal financial obligations, varying in kind, payment procedure, and consequences. This study examines how, and the extent to which, criminal legal debtors understand monetary sanctions. Based on interviews with 60 individuals who owed criminal legal debt in New York, we propose a typology of debtor understanding. Proximal understanding pertains to individual, case-level factors and is instrumentally oriented. Distal understanding concerns system-level matters and is oriented toward normativity and fairness. We examine how debtors develop each type of understanding, how these dimensions interact, and the implications of debtor understanding for compliance behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]