Karin D. Martin, Kimberly Spencer-Suarez, Gabriela Kirk

This article proposes the centrality of procedural integrity—or fidelity to local norms of case processing—to the post-sentencing adjudication of monetary sanctions. We draw on insights gained from observations of more than 4,200 criminal cases in sixteen courts in New York and Illinois and find that procedural integrity becomes a focal point in the absence of monetary sanctions paid in full and on time. This examination of the interplay between the sociolegal context and workgroups within courtrooms brings to light how case processing pressure, mandatory monetary sanctions, defendants with pronounced financial insecurity, and judicial discretion inform the role monetary sanctions play in court operations.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences January 2022, 8 (1) 128-147; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2022.8.1.06

By The American Bar Association, Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense and Arnold Ventures

For some people in New Mexico, a $100 fee could be paid the same day with little thought. For most New Mexicans, however, $100 is a significant percentage of monthly income, and payment might require the person to forego groceries or diapers or miss a car or rent payment.1 Despite these differences, in administering court fines and fees, New Mexico courts fail to adequately distinguish between those with the ability to pay and those for whom payment causes grave hardship. Far too often the result is the incarceration of those unable to pay in violation of Bearden v. Georgia. 2 The American Bar Association (ABA) has developed extensive policies to provide guidance to jurisdictions on how to fairly administer court fines and fees to ensure that individuals are not punished simply for being poor. In 2018, the ABA adopted the Ten Guidelines on Court Fines and Fees, which urge jurisdictions to eliminate or strictly limit user fees (Guideline 1), ensure timely and fair assessment of ability to pay (Guideline 4 & 7), waive or reduce fines and fees based on ability to pay (Guidelines 1 & 2), refrain from using driver’s license suspensions or other disproportionate punishments for nonpayment (Guideline 3), allow individualized alternatives to monetary penalties (Guideline 6), and provide counsel for individuals facing incarceration as a consequence of failure to pay (Guideline 8). To understand the administration of fines and fees in New Mexico’s misdemeanor courts, a team from the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense (ABA SCLAID) conducted court observation of the state’s Metropolitan, Magistrate, and Municipal Courts over a four-year period from 2018 to 2022. These observations revealed that New Mexico courts routinely fall short of ABA standards. Some of the study’s key observations include: • New Mexico courts assess a wide variety of fees, not just upon conviction, but also pretrial, for supervision, and in connection with bench warrants. Many of these are user fees. • New Mexico rules do not provide for timely assessment of ability to pay, nor do they provide adequate opportunities for reductions or waivers based on substantial hardship. • Current “ability to pay” assessments only allow an individual to adjust payment plans usually to make smaller monthly payments for longer periods, which increases opportunities for failure to pay and extends the individual’s involvement with the criminal justice system. • Bench warrants are routinely issued for failure to appear and, in addition to being subject to arrest, the individual is charged a $100 fee, and his/her driver’s license is suspended. • Unpaid fees often result in further bench warrants, with accompanying fees, exacerbating the cycle of bench warrants, arrests, and debt. • When arrested on a bench warrant for failure to pay, individuals are jailed without a finding that the failure to pay was willful.

• Judges rarely reduce or waive fines or fees unless the individual first serves time in jail. • The “payment” of fines and fees through credit for jail time is common. These fines and fees result in little, if any, financial benefit to New Mexico. A case study of individuals who were arraigned in Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) Metropolitan Court (incustody) during a one-week period in 2017 showed that 93% “paid” their fines and fees exclusively through incarceration, while only 3% actually paid their fines and fees in full. A similar one-week study of 2021 cases showed that incarceration remains the dominant form of “payment” (73% of individuals satisfied at least a portion of their fines and fees with jail time), while a similarly small percentage of individuals (4%) paid their fines and fees in full.3 To comply with ABA policies, New Mexico should consider: • Eliminating or reducing court fees, particularly user fees; • Revising procedures to ensure prompt consideration of ability to pay at the time fees or fines are imposed; • Ensuring that those for whom payment would cause substantial hardship have access to waiver or reduction of fees; • Improving the hearing notice process and increasing second-chance opportunities before bench warrants issue for failure to appear; • Discontinuing driver’s license suspension as a consequence of nonpayment; • Ensuring that individuals cannot be jailed for nonpayment until after an ability to pay hearing and a finding that the failure to pay was willful; • Guaranteeing counsel for any indigent individual facing incarceration for failure to pay; and • Improving alternative payment options and ensuring that those options are personalized and account for each individual’s circumstances. By adopting the recommendations of this report, New Mexico courts can bring their practices into compliance with not only with ABA policy, but also with the requirements of the U.S. Constitution. For this reason, New Mexico should consider reforms to improve its fine and fees procedures and ensure that its criminal justice system does not punish individuals simply for being poor.4

Chicago: ABA, 2023. 67p.

Wilson Center for Science and Justice and the Fines and Fees Justice Center

Ability to Pay, Collateral Consequences, Courts as Revenue Centers, Racial Disparities, Traffic Fines and Fees . Court-imposed debt impacts working families across all racial groups, political affiliations, and income levels. In the past ten years, a third of Americans have been directly affected by fines or fees related to traffic, criminal, juvenile, or municipal court. This report is the first national survey to examine how court-imposed fines and fees affect individuals and families. Researchers found that fines and fees debt creates hardships in people’s daily lives. Many respondents reported experiencing serious hardship, being impacted in three or more aspects of daily life.

Wilson Center for Science and Justice and the Fines and Fees Justice Center . 2023. 40p.

By Anna VanCleave, Brian Highsmith, Judith Resnik, Jeff Selbin, Lisa Foster

Money has a long history of being used as punishment, and punishment has a long history of being used discriminatorily and violently against communities of color. This volume surveys the many misuses of money as punishment and the range of efforts underway to undo the webs of fines, fees, assessments, charges, and surcharges that undergird so much of state and local funding. Whether in domains that are denominated “civil,” “criminal,” or “administrative,” and whether the needs are about law, health care, employment, housing, education, or safety services, racism intersects with the criminalization of poverty in all of life’s sectors to impose harms felt disproportionately by people of color. In the spring of 2020, the stark inequalities of the pandemic’s impact and of police killings sparked uprisings against the prevalence of state-based violence and of government failures. Those protests have underscored the urgent need for profound, sustainable transformations in government systems that have become all too familiar. This volume maps the structures that generate oppressive practices, the work underway to challenge the inequalities, and the range of proposals to seek lasting alterations of expectations and practices so as to shape a social and political order that is respectful of all individuals’ dignity, generative for communities, and provides a range of services to protect safety and well-being.

The Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School Fines & Fees Justice Center Policy Advocacy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, 2020. 337p.

By Joshua D. Houy

Fines and fees for legal violations finance American criminal justice systems but often at a severe cost to those incurring fines and fees. While fines and fees are a long-standing feature of the United States criminal justice system, the use of fines and fees recently captured attention of scholars in the wake of questions prompted by recent social, political, and legal developments. The central question is: What, if any, association is there between race, socioeconomic disadvantage, and county fine and fee issuance? The main hypothesis is: Fine and fee issuance of the most populous counties positively and significantly associate with race and socioeconomic disadvantage. To test this hypothesis, census data and multivariate regressions are exploited to examine associations between county fine and fee issuance, race, and socioeconomic disadvantage. Conflict-oriented theory serves to rationalize findings. A conflict theorist would expect areas with comparatively low socioeconomic status and high concentrations of certain minorities to fine relatively heavily. The findings from this study indicate confirmation that counties with a higher percentage of Black residents issue more fines and fees on a per capita basis than counties with a lower percentage of Black residents. Yet, the findings from this study fall short of indicating counties with comparatively low socioeconomic status are more likely to issue fines and fees.  

Vermillion, SD: University of South Dakota, 2022. 134p.

By Alabama Apppleseed

We surveyed 980 Alabamians from 41 counties about their experience with court debt, including 879 people who owed money themselves and 101 people who were paying debt for others. Of the people who owed money themselves, we found: More than eight in ten gave up necessities like rent, food, medical bills, car payments, and child support, in order to pay down their court debt. Almost four in ten admitted to having committed at least one crime to pay on their court debt. One in five people whose only previous offenses were traffic violations admitted to committing more serious offenses, including felonies, to pay off their traffic tickets. The most common offense committed to pay off court debt was selling drugs, followed by stealing and sex work. Survey respondents also admitted to passing bad checks, gambling, robbery, selling food stamps, and selling stolen items. 44% used payday or title loans to cover court debt. Almost two-thirds received money or food assistance from a faith-based charity or church that they would not have had to request if they weren’t paying court debt. Almost seven in ten were at some point declared indigent by a court, and by almost every measure, indigent survey-takers were treated more harshly than their non-indigent peers. They were more likely to have been turned down for or kicked out of diversion programs for financial reasons, more likely to have their debt increased, be threatened with jail, or actually be jailed for non-payment of court debt. Almost half of the people who took our survey did not think they would ever be able to pay what they owe. The 101 people who took our survey who were paying debt for other people (usually family members) were more likely to be middle-aged African-American women than to belong to any other demographic group. While others their age were saving money for retirement, helping their children with college or other expenses, paying down mortgages, or taking vacations, these African-American women were disproportionately burdened with paying court debt for their families.

Montgomery, AL: Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, 2018. 66p.

By Josh Pacewicz and John N. Robinson III

This article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects with policies that encourage competition over tax revenue to produce fiscal inequalities that fall along racial lines. Officials across the region shared views about ‘good’ revenues like sales taxes paid mostly by nonresidents, but those in black suburbs were unable to access them and instead turned to ‘bad’ revenues like legal fines to manage fiscal crises—even where residents were fairly affluent and despite the absence of discriminatory intent at the local level. These findings invite inquiry into the racially uneven consequences of seemingly colorblind municipal fiscal practices in the USA and the distributional consequences of municipal governance in other national contexts.  

Socio-Economic Review, 2021, Vol. 19, No. 3, 975–1003   

By The Fines and Fees Justice Center

Fees are imposed on people accused of offenses in criminal, juvenile, municipal, and traffic courts around the country and are used to fund all types of court- or government-related programs, activities, or functions. For decades, justice fees have been a way that states raise revenue through a system of hidden taxes.1 Among these court-imposed costs, there is a particularly pernicious category of fees that are imposed on people simply because they are involved with the justice system. Whether they are called administrative assessments, surcharges, court costs, privilege taxes, docket fees, or something else, the one thing they have in common is that they are imposed in nearly every criminal, traffic, or local ordinance case—regardless of the offense, sentence, or specific circumstance of the particular case. Most are imposed only after conviction, but others, like docket fees, are imposed even if a person is acquitted or the charges are dismissed.2 For the purposes of this report, we collectively call these fees “assessments and surcharges,” recognizing that they may go by other names in different jurisdictions. Ultimately, these are “catch all” fees that legislatures impose to collect money exclusively from people drawn into a state’s various justice systems.3  

New York: Fines and Fees Justice Center, 2022. 28p.