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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.

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.

RESEARCH SUMMARY: In addition to outsourcing the management of correctional facilities, many local and state authorities contract with private companies to provide a variety of services and processes within U.S. courthouses, jails, and prisons. In this article, we explore the various “cost points” at which individuals who make contact with public systems of justice are charged by private entities. We provide two case studies with an in-depth look at how private companies make money within U.S. justice facilities—court-ordered programs and prison services. POLICY IMPLICATIONS: Through our examples, we show the extent to which private companies generate profits within U.S. systems of justice and the potential impacts of justice “cost points” on those involved in these systems. We end by suggesting policy makers more thoroughly explore the reasons for the privatization of justice system practices and services and develop transparent oversight to ensure private arrangements do not impose undue burdens on justice-involved individuals and their families.

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.

Author(s): Shannon, Sarah; Huebner, Beth M.; Harris, Alexes; Martin, Karin; Patillo, Mary; Pettit, Becky; Sykes, Bryan; Uggen, Christopher | Abstract: 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.

Despite the central role that fines and other fiscal penalties play in systems of criminal justice, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. Court systems impose fines and other monetary sanctions in response to minor administrative and traffic offenses as well as for more serious criminal offenses. Monetary sanctions are intended to provide a deterrent punishment to reduce lawbreaking, to provide opportunities for accountability through financial restitution, to restore harm caused to victims of crime, and to fund the operation and administration of courts and criminal justice systems. Fines, fees, and other monetary sanctions are the most common form of punishment imposed by criminal justice systems. Most criminal sentences in the United States include financial penalties, and monetary sanctions are routinely imposed for less serious, and far more common, infractions such as traffic or parking violations. For many, paying a monetary sanction for a low-level violation is an annoyance. However, for the poor and people of color who are disproportionately likely to be subject to criminal justice system involvement, monetary sanctions can become a vehicle for expanded social inequality and increasingly severe criminal justice contact. Failure to pay legal financial obligations often results in court summons or license suspensions that may have attendant additional costs and may trigger incarceration. In the United States, the criminal justice system is heavily and routinely involved in the lives of low-income people of color. These already-existing biases, coupled with the deep poverty that is common in many communities, join to widen the net of criminal justice involvement by escalating low-level infractions to far more serious offenses when people are unable to pay. Despite the routine justification of monetary sanctions as less-severe penalties, if imposed without restriction on the poor, they are likely to magnify the inequality producing effects of criminal justice system involvement.

Research Summary Substantial fees and fines now are now routinely imposed by courts and other criminal justice agencies across the United States. This article summarizes research on the imposition of monetary sanctions in the United States and shows how they differ from European day fines. In the contemporary United States, court-imposed legal financial obligations supplement other criminal penalties in the majority of felony and misdemeanor cases. Judges impose many fees and fines at their discretion, and evidence from Washington State indicates that extralegal factors–including ethnicity–influence their assessment. Many states have also authorized jails, departments of correction, and probation offices to levy fees. In the United States, fees and fine amounts are determined by statute and are not tethered to defendants’ earnings. Recent studies suggest that the assessment of these penalties often generate long-term debts that are sizeable relative to expected earnings and impede reintegration. Policy Implications This essay contends that the disadvantages of the widespread and discretionary imposition of substantial and supplementary financial penalties outweigh any benefits associated with this practice. Proponents of correctional and court fees argue that offenders—not taxpayers—should pay for the cost of punishing their misdeeds. The idea that offenders should foot the bill for criminal justice expenditures is a moral and political claim, one that likely has broad appeal. Nonetheless, this claim is in tension with at least two other important principles. First, public criminal law systems rest on the premise that crime is mainly a wrong against the state; violations of criminal law are thought to be significant enough to warrant the state's usurpation of the dispute resolution process. Compelling defendants to reimburse the state for its criminal justice expenditures is in tension with this principle. Moreover, unlike users of other services for which fees are assessed, penal targets are compelled to partake of these services; they cannot use fewer of them or look for an alternative provider of them. It can be argued that if the state compels penal targets to use (often expensive and ineffective) state “services,” then the government is obligated to pay for them. Indeed, this fiscal obligation is arguably an important check on government power. Competing moral and political arguments regarding the appropriateness of assessing fees to recoup criminal justice expenditures thus exist. Even if it were universally accepted, the idea that offenders should pay for their adjudication, punishment and rehabilitation must be balanced against policy and practical considerations, as well as against ethical issues concerning justice and fairness. Our analysis pertains only to the imposition of fees and fines in the contemporary United States and does not extend to European-style imposition of day fines. The widespread assessment of substantial and nongraduated fees and fines lacks a convincing penological rationale, is incompatible with policy efforts to facilitate reintegration, and raises numerous concerns about justice and fairness. At least in theory, penal policies are aimed at incapacitation, rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution. Monetary sanctions do not appear to accomplish any of these goals. By definition, monetary sanctions do not prevent crime by incapacitating offenders. Theoretically, monetary sanctions might be rehabilitative if their repeal was offered as a reward for participation in rehabilitative programs or prosocial outcomes. Yet erasure of legal debt generally is not offered as a reward for good behavior. For a penalty to effectively deter wrong-doing, its consequences must be known to potential offenders as they contemplate their options; swiftness and certainty are key. But the assessment of monetary sanctions is characterized by neither swiftness nor certainty. Finally, because monetary penalties in the United States are supplements to criminal penalties that already are comparatively severe, directly and adversely impact the partners and children of the criminally convicted, and typically remain in effect long after all other elements of criminal sentences are completed, they are disproportionate to the offense and, hence, approach vengeance rather than retribution. Monetary sanctions also complicate reintegration. An estimated 700,000 inmates return to civil society from jail or prison every year. In this context, researchers and policy makers increasingly emphasize the need to facilitate the reintegration and stabilization of the criminally convicted. Yet there is evidence that the widespread imposition of substantial and nongraduated fees and fines impedes reentry. For example, legal debt tends to be long term due to the low earning power of the criminally sanctioned, the magnitude of the sanctions imposed, and the accrual of interest. Monetary sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system thus constitute an additional, substantial, and often long-term financial liability for people living with a criminal conviction. Like other types of debt, legal debt reduces access to housing, credit, and employment; it also limits possibilities for improving one's educational or occupational situation. Unpaid legal debt can lead to a warrant, an arrest, and/or incarceration. In some locales, legal debtors also are denied drivers’ licenses, a practice that creates an additional barrier to employment. Legal debt thus has a variety of adverse and destabilizing consequences for those who possess it, including the threat of arrest and incarceration. The widespread imposition and collection of substantial and supplementary monetary sanctions in the United States also raises several important concerns about fairness and justice. In particular, nongraduated monetary penalties supplement already severe confinement sentences, impose a disproportionate burden on the poor, and are, at least in Washington State, influenced by various extralegal factors, including ethnicity. These penalties also directly and adversely affect family members, lead with some frequency to the arrest and incarceration of debtors, and raise important questions about the meaning and legacy of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). Moreover, the collection of fees and fines to fund government operations is of uncertain fiscal benefit to the state. A comprehensive assessment of the fiscal benefit to the state of imposing fees and fines must consider both the direct and indirect costs associated with the collection of LFOs. It is unclear that the results of this mathematical exercise would, if the necessary data were available, show that the imposition and collection of LFOs is a net financial gain. Even if revenues from fees and fines are greater than the expenditures devoted to their collection, dependence on this private funding source for criminal justice operations arguably compromises the integrity of courts and creates conflicts of interest for judges. This essay concludes that the widespread imposition of nongraduated, supplementary and substantial monetary penalties by U.S. criminal justice agencies lacks a convincing penological rationale, is incompatible with policy efforts to facilitate reentry, raises important concerns about fairness and justice, is of uncertain financial benefit to the state, and arguably compromises the integrity of the courts.

Recent research suggests that the use of monetary sanctions as a supplementary penalty in state and federal criminal courts is expanding, and that their imposition creates substantial and deleterious legal debt. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence the discretionary imposition of these penalties. This study offers a comprehensive account of the role socio-cultural factors, especially race and ethnicity, have in this institutional sanctioning process. We rely on multilevel statistical analysis of the imposition of monetary sanctions in Washington State courts to test our theory. The theoretical framework emphasizes the need to treat race and ethnicity as complex cultural categories, the meaning and institutional effects of which may vary across time and space. Findings indicate that racialized crime scripts, such as the association of Latinos with drugs, affect defendants whose wrong-doing is stereotype congruent. Moreover, all individuals accused of committing racially and ethnically stigmatized offenses in racialized contexts may experience the courtesy stigma that flows from racialization. We find that race and ethnicity are not just individual attributes but cultural categories that shape the distribution of stigma and the institutional consequences that flow from it.

This article investigates the discourse individuals use when talking about desisting from criminal offending. I analyze the links between offenders’ accounts of past negative behavior, their construction of their possible “clean” future selves, and the social and structural conditions in which they were raised and continue to be embedded. Applying Scott and Lyman's (1968) framework on accounts and Markus and Nurius's (1986) framework of possible selves to interview data with twenty-eight criminal offenders, I illustrate how excuses for past behavior provide a way for people to distance themselves from their past selves in attempts to preserve or re-create a possible self that is still worthy to be redeemed in the future. This discourse becomes one mechanism that motivates individuals to change their lives—but it can be short-lived. The analysis highlights how limited structural opportunities influence individuals’ lifestyles and behaviors, how individuals approach the desistance process even in the face of structural deprivation, and how they attempt to sustain this desistance process.

The expansion of the U.S. penal system has important consequences for poverty and inequality, yet little is known about the imposition of monetary sanctions. This study analyzes national and state‐level court data to assess their imposition and interview data to identify their social and legal consequences. Findings indicate that monetary sanctions are imposed on a substantial majority of the millions of people convicted of crimes in the United States annually and that legal debt is substantial relative to expected earnings. This indebtedness reproduces disadvantage by reducing family income, by limiting access to opportunities and resources, and by increasing the likelihood of ongoing criminal justice involvement.

This paper investigates institutional decision-making processes and identify mechanisms that link case processing with subsequent outcomes. Using a sample of juvenile court cases containing probation officers’ narratives, this study investigated court actors’ focal concerns and how such priorities shape attributions about youth. This paper adds to existing sociological work on institutional decision-making by (1) illustrating court actors’ focal concerns that are used to process juvenile cases, (2) identifying decision-making mechanisms that link norms and values to case assessments and outcomes, and (3) theorizing about the ways in which individual and case characteristics can influence institutional decision-making.

Shaming is a mechanism theorists have highlighted as an important means of social control. However, this concept and the ways in which officials use shame in the context of formal social control is not easily studied. Interviews with a Southern California juvenile court judge and observations of his interactions with youths on probation are used to illustrate the reflexive nature of social control interactions. This ethnographic study illustrates how the emotion of shame is used to manage delinquent and defiant young people in a justice setting. A nuanced analysis of the various strategies used by this juvenile court judge to evoke signs of remorse, accountability, and deference from young offenders is provided. Such an investigation informs theoretical perspectives on how social control is employed, highlights the important role of power in the interactions, and provides a better understanding of theoretical concepts, such as reintegration and stigmatization.

This study investigates the types of decision-making models that frame people-processing decisions. An analysis of the judicial waiver hearing will be used as an example of such institutional processing. I investigate how decision makers engage in practical reasoning by exploring the methods they use to organize information about youth and accomplish their judicial duties. Observational and interview data from a case study of three juvenile courthouses in a California county are used to investigate official case processing. The study offers three important theoretical insights for research in sociology and criminology; a revised theoretical framework for understanding juvenile justice decision making that incorporates criminal justice frameworks, an analysis of how substantive factors (e.g., values, stereotypes, assumptions) can enter into decision making, and an illustration of how decision making is organizationally situated.

Although tensions between substantive and formal rationality in the adult criminal justice system have received a great deal of attention, the existence of these tensions in the juvenile justice system has received little scholarly consideration. I seek to remedy this gap by exploring how punitive policies associated with the war on crime impact the formal and informal process of justice, the court community and work group, and the exercise of discretion in the juvenile courts. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three juvenile courts in Southern California, I identify the mechanisms by which prosecutors divert judicial discretion from the traditional rehabilitation-oriented bench officers to bench officers who are more accepting of the criminalization of juveniles. In addition, I investigate how and why rehabilitation-oriented bench officers at times abdicate their decisionmaking authority and make rulings that contradict their own assessments. My findings suggest that as the war on crime is extended to youth, the juvenile courts increasingly share the criminal courts' emphasis on offense rather than offender, enhanced prosecutorial power, and adversarial relationships within the court.

Youth of color are dramatically under-represented in California institutions of higher education. Conversely in California and nationwide, African American and Latino youth are disproportionately over-represented at every major decision point in the juvenile justice system [Leiber, M. (2002). Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) of youth: An analysis of state and federal efforts to address the issue. Crime and Delinquency, 48(1), 3-45]. We offer a conceptual framework seeking a deeper understanding of the connections between youth socialization and two major social control institutions in America: the juvenile justice system and the educational system. We suggest that in order to understand fully the interconnections between the under-representation of African Americans in higher education and their over-representation in the juvenile justice system, a broader exploration of the common macro- and micro-structural factors shared by these institutions is required. We argue that race-ethnic inequities result from discriminatory state policies, institutional practices and gatekeeper decision-making. This paper suggests that without key reforms, which financially reprioritize education, rehabilitation, and youth in general, the distorted representation of youth of color in public institutions will persist. The conclusion offers several measures that if implemented will help achieve realistic change within institutions of higher education and criminal justice.

This article provides a literature review of research that investigates the relationship between the United States education and criminaljustice systems. From a sociological perspective, our aim is to explore mechanisms that have been identified as leading to successes and failures within the two respective institutions. In particular, we highlight research conducted on alternative school programs. Furthermore, we provide a discussion about the processes that link the two systems, namely state funding and punitive policies within schools.