By Shamena Anwar Shawn Bushway, John Engberg

Roughly half of U.S. counties do not provide defense counsel at bail hearings, and few studies have documented the potential impacts of legal representation at this stage. This paper presents the results from a field experiment in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, that provided a public defender at a defendant’s initial bail hearing. The presence of a public defender decreased the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention without increasing failure to appear rates at the preliminary hearing. The intervention did, however, result in a short-term increase in rearrests on theft charges, although a theft incident would have to be at least 8.5 times as costly as a day in detention for jurisdictions to find this tradeoff undesirable.

Sci. Adv. 9, eade3909 (2023) 5 May 2023

By Mario Salas and Angela Ciolfi

Across the country, millions of people have lost their licenses simply because they are too poor to pay, effectively depriving them of reliable, lawful transportation necessary to get to and from work, take children to school, keep medical appointments, care for ill or disabled family members, or, paradoxically, to meet their financial obligations to the courts. State laws suspending or revoking driver’s licenses to punish failure to pay court costs and fines are ubiquitous, despite the growing consensus that this kind of policy is unfair and counterproductive. Fortythree states and the District of Columbia use driver’s license suspension to coerce payment of government debts arising out of traffic or criminal convictions. Most state statutes contain no safeguards to distinguish between people who intentionally refuse to pay and those who default due to poverty, punishing both groups equally harshly as if they were equally blameworthy. License-for-payment systems punish people—not for any crime or traffic violation, but for unpaid debts. Typically, when a state court finds a person guilty of a crime or traffic violation, it orders the person to pay a fine or other penalty along with other administrative court costs and fees. If the person does not pay on time, the court or motor vehicle agency can—and in some states, must—punish the person by suspending his or her driver’s license until the person pays in full or makes other payment arrangements with the court. By cutting people off from jobs, license-for-payment systems create a self-defeating vicious cycle. A state suspends the license even though a person cannot afford to pay, which then makes the person less likely to pay once he or she cannot drive legally to work. The person now faces an unenviable choice: drive illegally and risk further punishment (including incarceration in some states), or stay home and forgo the needs of his or her family. In this way, license-for-payment systems create conditions akin to modern-day debtor’s prisons. Despite their widespread use, license-for-payment systems are increasingly drawing critical scrutiny from motor vehicle safety professionals, anti-poverty and civil rights advocates, and policymakers. new state- based advocacy campaigns across the country have produced reforms by way of the courts, legislatures, and executive agencies. To provide national context for these efforts, we analyzed license-for-payment systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to generate conclusions about the prevalence and uses of license-for-payment.

Charlottesville, VA: Legal Aid Justice Center, 2017. 20p.

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 Mary Pattillo and Gabriela Kirk

Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology of financialization that shows how the creditor/debtor relationship commodifies freedom, confuses and suffuses court processes, amplifies control, and expands the financial sector into domains that obligate participation. Layaway freedom represents a case of coercive financialization, or the externally imposed, involuntary, or last-resort entry into financial engagements. The manipulation of money and time achieves disproportionate punishment that is multiplicative, rather than simply additive, all under the guise of routine financial responsibility. The authors discuss implications of these concepts for both economic and criminal-legal sociology

American Journal of Sociology, Volume 126 Number 4 (January 2021): 889–930

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 Aravind Boddupalli and Livia Mucciolo

State and local governments collected $16 billion in fiscal year 2019 from financial penalties imposed on people who had contact with the justice system, according to US Census Bureau data. These penalties included speeding tickets (including those from automated traffic cameras), parking tickets, court-imposed administrative fees, and forfeitures or seizures of property believed by law enforcement officials to be connected to crimes. In total, fines, fees, and forfeitures account for less than 1 percent of total state and local general revenue, but the way they are enforced can create unjust burdens. These financial penalties often disproportionately fall on low-income people of color, particularly Black people (O’Neill, Kennedy, and Harris 2021; Sances and You 2017). In addition, consequences for those unable to pay can be severe (Menendez et al. 2019). Reliance on fines, fees, and forfeitures as a revenue source can also engender conflicts of interest for government officials. For example, states and localities have ramped up speeding ticket enforcement and arrests for various violations in response to budgetary shortfalls and political pressures (Makowsky, Stratmann, and Tabarrok 2019). In this report, we first examine how much states and localities report collecting from fines, fees, and forfeitures, highlighting the states and localities most reliant on them as a revenue source. While the average state and local share of revenue from fines, fees, and forfeitures is relatively small, these shares are larger for some local governments, especially small cities. We then explore how revenue from some fines and fees (we exclude forfeitures from this analysis) are allocated in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of cities. We specifically focus on speeding tickets as an illustrative example. Overall, we find that in at least 43 states, some portion of speeding ticket revenue is allocated toward a court or law enforcement fund. This finding reveals the potential for conflicts of interest and misaligned fiscal incentives. That is, police officers and judges might levy fines and fees with the intent of funding their respective agencies, as was demonstrated by the 2015 US Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri’s police department (US Department of Justice 2015). We additionally find that many states use fines and fees to fund general government services unrelated to cost recovery for the justice system, such as special funds for health care or highway initiatives.

Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 2022. 39p.

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 Lisa Keen and Suzanne B. Goldberg

n 1992, the voters of Colorado passed a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to prevent the state or any local government from adopting any law or policy that protected a person with a homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation from discrimination. This amendment was immediately challenged in the courts as a denial of equal protection of the laws under the United States Constitution. This litigation ultimately led to a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Colorado ballot initiative. Suzanne Goldberg, an attorney involved in the case from the beginning on behalf of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Lisa Keen, a journalist who covered the initiative campaign and litigation, tell the story of this case, providing an inside view of this complex and important litigation.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

By Becca Cadoff, Preeti Chauha, Erica Bond,

• Misdemeanor Arrest Rates: The misdemeanor arrest rates in all Research Network jurisdictions decreased in recent years. These declines often followed a period of significant increases in misdemeanor enforcement. • Misdemeanor Arrests by Race: Black people were arrested at the highest rates of any racial/ ethnic group for all jurisdictions across the entire study period. Racial disparities between Black people and White people existed in all jurisdictions, and these disparities persisted despite the recent overall declines in arrest rates. However, the magnitude of the disparities varied by jurisdiction and over time -- ranging from approximately three to seven arrests of Black people for one arrest of a White person. • Misdemeanor Arrests by Age: Arrest rates were highest for younger age groups (i.e., 18-20-year-olds and 21-24-year-olds) at the beginning of the study period. At the same time, arrest rates were generally much lower for the oldest age group (i.e., 35-65-year-olds). Over time, arrest rates for the younger age groups fell the most, sometimes to rates lower than 25-34-year-olds. • Misdemeanor Arrests by Sex: Males were arrested at higher rates than females in all jurisdictions across the study period. Although the arrest rates for males fell more than for females, this gender gap in arrest rates persisted over the study period. • Misdemeanor Arrests by Charge: Within the context of fluctuating misdemeanor arrests, the composition of misdemeanor charges changed over time across most sites. Cross-jurisdiction trends indicate a move away from more discretionary, drug-related charges and an increase in the share of charges where there is an identifiable complainant or victim (“person-related” offenses)….

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice , 2020. 34p.

Used book-may contain mark-up

By Alan M. Dershowtiz

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that "hard cases make bad law." In Taking Liberties, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz writes for the layperson about the hard cases and thorny issues that come before our courts today. Should parents be compelled to testify against their own children? Can your employer force you to submit to a random drug test, even if you never have used drugs? Does the government have the right to find out what home videos you have rented? Should an otherwise qualified nominee to the Supreme Court be rejected solely on grounds of his ideology? Where is the line between vigilantism and self-defense? Does the jury have the final say on matters of truth? How should the victims of AIDS be treated in the workplace and in the schools? To scores of questions like these, each arising from the issues of an actual case or controversy, Dershowitz offers incisive and often surprising an- swers. Outspoken, thought-provoking, Taking Liberties is a book to savor and enjoy--a rare opportunity to watch one of America's foremost legal minds at work.

New York. Contemporary Books. 1988. 348p.

By Lorinda Riley

his research report describes a collaboration between the University of Hawaii and Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Court. The research team sought to understand when and how tribal judges use restorative approaches in their cases, and they specifically hoped to look at the role of substance use and crime severity in the decision-making process of when to use restorative approaches. The report provides a summary of the research, including conceptualization and re-conceptualization prompted by legal changes and the Covid-19 pandemic, a statement of problem and research question, justice system background, research methodology, and findings; it details the process of collaboration; and provides author reflections on challenges experienced, lessons learned, and successes; and the appendices include supporting documents. The author describes how the research team developed the survey that would be used in the research study, including questions about the role of a tribal court in describing the strength of identification with restorative principles. Survey responses indicated that respondents self-rated their knowledge of traditionally appropriate behavior as a 7.2 and knowledge of modern-day behavior as 7.6 out of 10; respondents overwhelmingly believed that the Tribal Court should focus on “getting to the truth” and “making the perpetrator a productive member of society,” but were equally split about whether the court should “punish the offender” or “make the victim whole.” The author suggests that the results indicate the community has endorsed a desire for a restorative-focused tribal justice system. The author also noted the cultural differences and experiences of individuals living on reservation compared to those in the general population.

University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa: 2023. 64p.

By Don Weatherburn, Steve Yeong, Suzanne Poynton, Nikky Jones and Michael Farrell

The Drug Court has been in operation in New South Wales since 1999. It is reserved for drug dependant individuals residing in Western or South Western Sydney who have (or intend to) plead guilty to a non-violent summary offence and are likely to receive a prison sentence. Participation in the Drug Court involves intensive supervision and monitoring by the court, frequent drug testing, sanctioning for non-compliance and treatment for drug dependency. The current study extends an earlier evaluation of the NSW Drug Court undertaken by Weatherburn et al. (2008). It aims to assess whether the Drug Court has any long-term positive effect on re-offending. Specifically, it compares individuals accepted into the Drug Court with individuals referred to but not accepted onto the program across five outcomes:
1. Time to first new offence of any type;
2. Time to first new person offence;
3. Time to first new property offence;
4. Time to first new drug offence;
5. Total number of reconvictions after referral to the Drug Court.

Sydney:  NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, 2020. 16p.

By The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction 

This publication answers some of the more frequently asked questions raised in discussions about cannabis legislation. While the primary focus is on the use of cannabis for recreational purposes, relevant legislation for other uses, including medical and commercial cannabis-derived products such as cosmetics, wellness products and foods, is included in order to provide the necessary context for various policy initiatives.

Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2023. 57p.

Edited And Translated By Carl Stephenson And Frederick George Marcham

FROM THE PREFACE: “ In organizing a book of this sort, and one that must be kept to a useful size for an elementary course, the most difficult task is that of selection. Possibly half the available space must be assigned to the great monuments that everybody considers essen- tial. But from all the other accumulated records of thirteen cen- turies just what shall be taken? Constantly faced with the embarrassing duty of excluding one document in order to include another, we have in general sought to be guided by the experience of the class-room--to govern our choice by the needs of the ordinary student. And above all else we have prized direct informa- tion concerning the organs of government….”.

London. Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1937. 933p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By John William Wertheimer

Race and the Law in South Carolina carefully reconstructs the social history behind six legal disputes heard in the South Carolina courts between the 1840s and the 1940s. The book uses these case studies to probe the complex relationship between race and the law in the American South during a century that included slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Throughout most of the period covered in the book, the South Carolina legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of nonwhite people. Occasionally, however, the legal system also provided a public forum—perhaps the region’s best—within which racism could openly be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power. During the era of slavery, both enslaved and nominally “free” Black South Carolinians suffered extreme legal disenfranchisement. They had no political voice and precious little access to legal redress. They could not vote, serve in public office, sit on juries, or testify in court against whites. There were no Black lawyers. Black South Carolinians had essentially no claims-making ability, resulting, unsurprisingly, in a deeply oppressive, thoroughly racialized system. Most of these antebellum legal disenfranchisements were overturned during the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. In the wake of abolition, Reconstruction-era reformers in South Carolina erased one racial distinction after another from state law. For a time, Black men voted and Black jurors sat in rough proportion to their share of the state’s population. ……

Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2023.  346p.

Edited by Maureen Mulholland and Brian Pullan with Anne Pullan  

This book is about trials, civil and criminal, ecclesiastical and secular, in England and Europe between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The opening chapter provides a conceptual framework both for this book and for its companion volume on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Subsequent chapters provide a rounded view of trials conducted according to different procedures within contrasting legal systems, including English common law and Roman canon law. They consider the judges and juries and the amateur and professional advisers involved in legal processes as well as the offenders brought before the courts, with the reasons for prosecuting them and the defences they put forward. The cases examined range from a fourteenth century cause-célèbre, the attempted trial of Pope Boniface VIII for heresy, to investigations of obscure people for sexual and religious offences in the city states of Geneva and Venice. Technical terms have been cut to a minimum to ensure accessibility and appeal to lawyers, social, political and legal historians, undergraduate and postgraduates as well as general readers interested in the development of the trial through time. 

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. 197p.

Edited by R.A. Melikan

How does the trial function? What are the tools, in terms of legal principle, scientific knowledge, social norms, and political practice, which underpin this most important decision-making process? This collection of nine essays by an international group of scholars explores these crucial questions. Focusing both on English criminal, military, and parliamentary trials, and upon national and international trials for war crimes, this book illuminates the diverse forces that have shaped trials during the modern era. The contributors approach their subject from a variety of perspectives - legal history, social history, political history, sociology, and international law. With an appreciation and understanding of the relevant legal procedures, they address wider issues of psychology, gender, bureaucracy, and international relations within the adjudicative setting. Their inter-disciplinary approach imparts to this book a breadth not usually seen in studies of the courtroom. Scholars and students of modern British history, political science, and international law, as well as legal history, will find these essays stimulating and informative. 

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003. 207p.

By Saba Rouhani, Catherine Tomko,  Noelle P. Weicker, Susan G. Sherman 

 In March 2020, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that drug and paraphernalia possession as well as prostitution would no longer be prosecuted in Baltimore City. • In the 14-month period following the policy change, we observed significant declines in arrests for drug and paraphernalia possession as well as prostitution, as reported by both the Baltimore Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office. Using Baltimore Police Department-reported arrest data, we estimated that 443 drug and paraphernalia possession arrests were averted in the 14-month period following the policy change, the majority (78%) of which were averted among Black individuals. • Using Maryland Courts Judicial Information Systems arrest data, we found an extremely low prevalence of rearrests for serious crimes, such as robbery and assault, in the 14-month period following the policy change: 0.8 percent, or six of the 741 individuals whose drug and prostitution charges were dropped. This suggests that the vast majority of direct beneficiaries of the policy change did not go on to commit crimes threatening public safety. • There was no evidence of an increase in public complaints pertaining to drugs or prostitution, measured by 911 calls made in Baltimore City, following the policy change. • Though causality cannot be established, these preliminary findings suggest that declining to prosecute low level drug and prostitution offenses may avert arrests among individuals with intersecting vulnerabilities without posing a threat to public safety or resulting in increased public complaints. Ensuring that these individuals can access health and social service instead of criminal punishment is a public health priority.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health ,  Department of Health, Behavior and Society:  2023. 21p. 

By The U.S. Government Accountability Office 

  Online marketing and communication platforms can enable sex trafficking— the commercial sexual exploitation of adults through force, fraud or coercion, or children under the age of 18 (with or without force, fraud, or coercion)—by making it easier for traffickers to exploit victims and connect with buyers. Section 3 of FOSTA established criminal penalties for those who promote or facilitate prostitution and sex trafficking through their control of online platforms. It also allows for those injured by an aggravated violation involving the promotion of prostitution of five or more people or reckless disregard of sex trafficking to recover damages in a federal civil action. It also makes federal criminal restitution mandatory for aggravated offenses contributing to sex trafficking. FOSTA includes a provision for GAO to provide detailed information on restitution and civil damages. This report examines: (1) DOJ enforcement efforts against online platforms that promote prostitution and sex trafficking, from 2014 through 2020; and (2) the extent to which criminal restitution and civil damages have been sought and awarded for aggravated violations under section 3 of FOSTA. GAO reviewed federal criminal cases brought against those who controlled platforms in the online commercial sex market from 2014 through 2020; visited a selection of online platforms in this market; and conducted a legal search to identify criminal and civil cases brought pursuant to section 3 of FOSTA. GAO also interviewed DOJ officials and representatives from third parties. 

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021. 56p.