By Philip Mullen, Clare Collins, and Katy Savage

This research was commissioned by HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) to identify the factors preventing defendants to engage in criminal courts processes. We interviewed 38 defendants with recent criminal cases and explored how they can better be supported in various stages of courts processes, especially around legal representation, from their own perspective.

The report details how the lack of user-friendly and timely information or support with signposting create additional barriers for defendants, and how early intervention is key to foster engagement.

London: Revolving Doors, 2022. 55p.

By Stephanie Agnew

Across the country, regressive court fines, administrative costs, and filing fees are functioning to penalize people solely for their poverty.

Court costs, fines, and fees (also known as “monetary sanctions”) exist in both the civil and criminal realms of the justice system and are applied in all 50 states. Illinois, specifically, imposes a panoply of these costs in connection with various proceedings and convictions in both civil and criminal courts, with approximately 90 distinct fines or fees on the books today. These racked charges include, among others: “reimbursement” fees to police, prosecutors, and public defenders; probation oversight fees; costs for electronic monitoring bracelets, drug-testing, participation in court-ordered programs; fees for document storage and delivery; and many more. In Illinois, there is no limit to the amount of money that can be sanctioned in a single case.

Chicago: Chicago Appleseed and Chicago Council of Lawyers, 2020. 43p.

By Hayley Hahn

In recent decades, states and municipalities have increasingly relied on court fines and fees to overcome budget shortfalls. Existing literature underscores the varied and adverse impacts of court debt, as well as the disproportionate incidence of such debt on people of color and poor people of all races. Yet, few pieces of scholarship directly link increased imposition of court fines and fees to decreased dependence on traditional progressive taxes. This article aims to fill the gap. Using the Law and Political Economy (LPE) framework, I argue that increased imposition of court debt derives from heightened antitax sentiment and the erosion of the state and local tax bases. In the process, I contend, the tax and court debt systems reflect and exacerbate racial inequality. I conclude by proposing a conceptual framework to abate reliance on court debt, advancing the LPE mission.

Journal of Law and Political Economy, 2(1) 2021.

By Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith

Millions in the United States face financial sanctions in the criminal court system each year, totaling over $27 billion in overall criminal debt. In this study, we leverage five distinct natural experiments across multiple states using regression discontinuity designs to evaluate the causal impact of these sanctions. We consider a range of long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, and other self-reported measures of well-being, measured using a combination of administrative records on earnings and employment, the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System, and household surveys. We find consistent evidence across the range of natural experiments and subgroup analyses of precise null effects on the population, ruling out long-run impacts larger than +/-3.6% on total earnings and +/- 4.7% on total recidivism. These results are inconsistent with theories of criminal debt poverty traps but also do not justify using financial sanctions for local revenue or as a crime control tool.

Unpublished paper, 2023. 54p.

By Matthew Menendez, Michael F. Crowley, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Noah Atchison

The past decade has seen a troubling and well-documented increase in fees and fines imposed on defendants by criminal courts. Today, many states and localities rely on these fees and fines to fund their court systems or even basic government operations.

A wealth of evidence has already shown that this system works against the goal of rehabilitation and creates a major barrier to people reentering society after a conviction.

They are often unable to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in accumulated court debt. When debt leads to incarceration or license suspension, it becomes even harder to find a job or housing or to pay child support. There’s also little evidence that imposing onerous fees and fines improves public safety.

Now, this first-of-its-kind analysis shows that in addition to thwarting rehabilitation and failing to improve public safety, criminal-court fees and fines also fail at efficiently raising revenue.

The high costs of collection and enforcement are excluded from most assessments, meaning that actual revenues from fees and fines are far lower than what legislators expect. And because fees and fines are typically imposed without regard to a defendant’s ability to pay, jurisdictions have billions of dollars in unpaid court debt on the books that they are unlikely to ever collect. This debt hangs over the heads of defendants and grows every year.

This study examines 10 counties across Texas, Florida, and New Mexico, as well as statewide data for those three states. The counties vary in their geographic, economic, political, and ethnic profiles, as well as in their practices for collecting and enforcing fees and fines.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law 2019. 68p.

By Rebekah Diller

Increasingly, states are turning to so-called “user fees” and surcharges to underwrite criminal justice costs and close budget gaps. In this report, we focus on Florida, a state that relies so heavily on fees to fund its courts that observers have coined a term for it – “cash register justice.” Since 1996, Florida added more than 20 new categories of financial obligations for criminal defendants and, at the same time, eliminated most exemptions for those who cannot pay. The fee increases have not been accompanied by any evident consideration of their hidden costs: the cumulative impacts on those required to pay, the ways in which the debt can lead to new offenses, and the costs to counties, clerks and courts of collection mechanisms that fail to exempt those unable to pay. This report examines the impact of the Florida Legislature’s decision to levy more user fees on persons accused and convicted of crimes, without providing exemptions for the indigent. Its conclusions are troubling. Florida relies heavily on fees to underwrite its criminal justice system and, at times, uses monies generated by fees to subsidize general revenue. In many cases, the debts are uncollectible; performance standards for court clerks, for example, expect that only 9 percent of fees levied in felony cases will be collected. Yet, aggressive collection practices result in a range of collateral consequences. Missed payments produce more fees. Unpaid costs prompt the suspension of driving privileges (and, relatedly, the ability to get to work).

New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2019. 48p.