by Phil Bowen

This data review is a quantitative analysis of Citizens Advice data for clients who faced fine arrears between 2019 and 2023. It sits within our research project looking at the impact of court fines on people on low incomes, alongside our report, 'Where the hell am I going to get that money from?: The impact of court fines on people on low incomes'. It specifically seeks answers to the following questions: How has the court fine been used over the past five years?; Which offences do people get fined for?; Who gets fined and what are the demographics of those individuals who receive fines?; And what are the outcomes associated with fines, specifically repayment rates, re-offending rates and imprisonment for fine default?

London: Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024. 37p.

by Lucy Slade

Despite court fines being the most used sentence in the English and Welsh criminal justice system, it is rare that they feature in the discussion of justice reform engaged in by policymakers, academics and the third sector. To shine a light on this important, but under examined, area of our justice system, the Centre has undertaken a research project looking specifically what is the impact of their use. It is the first of its kind to look at what ought to happen— and what actually does. As part of this project, we have reviewed the literature of court fines and financial impositions in the criminal courts of England and Wales. This is accompanied by our report, which brings together the findings of our review of publicly available data, and qualitative interviews with people in low-incomes who have received a fine.

London: Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024. 11p.

by Lucy Slade and Stephen Whitehead

Almost everyone who is convicted in a court in England and Wales leaves with a bill to pay. Yet there is a striking gap in our knowledge on the most common sentencing outcome handed down by our courts: the court fine. A new report by the Centre for Justice Innovation published today (16 May 2024) seeks to address this knowledge gap. The report is called: “Where the hell am I going to get that money from?” The impact of court fines on people on low incomes.

The research, specifically conducted during this cost of living crisis, suggest that the impacts of getting a court fine are often highly disproportionate: while better off people experience only minor hardships, such as forgoing a holiday,for a significant number of those on the lowest incomes paying their court fine pushed them deeper towards unmanageable debt, destitution and significant levels of anxiety and mental anguish.

The research highlights that, contrary to the sentencing objectives of the court fine, the financial impact of fines and charges are not experienced equally by people with different levels of means. The research also found major gaps on the data collected, especially on the socio-economic status of those who are fined, meaning there is not a clear picture of who gets fined, who pays and who doesn’t (and why).

The research. The research is a comprehensive study based on a wide range of sources including interviews with 56 people with experience of fines who live on a low income; a literature review; analysis of public data on court fines; and of Citizens Advice data for clients who faced fine arrears between 2019 and 2023; and focus groups with 14 magistrates.

Findings from the data review:

• Men received the majority of fines (2,534,714, 64%), with women receiving 944,547 (24%), and a further 474,557 fines issued where sex was not recorded (12%). This is in keeping with the preponderance of men in the sentencing and the criminal justice caseload more generally.

• Women were proportionally more likely to receive fines than men (85% compared with 73%), in part, because they are more likely to commit the less serious offences, which result in a fine.

• Of the ten offences for which fines are most often issued, women receive the majority of fines for only one of these, TV licence evasion, where they represent three quarters of people whose gender is recorded.

Key findings

Almost everyone who is convicted of a crime in a court in England and Wales leaves with a bill to pay. Over 75% of people convicted each year are sentenced to a fine. Yet while many of the offences for which fines are given are deemed “minor,” the research suggests that, for people on low incomes, the impact of fines is anything but.

• A large number of the offences for which court fines are imposed are strongly linked to people’s pre-existing poverty, such as TV licence evasion.

• Many of the 56 interviewees reported that the financial burdens placed on them by the court had pushed them further into debt, with some pushed into destitution and into further offending to pay off the court fine.

• For some, the financial burdens took a severe toll on their mental and physical health, particularly where they faced prolonged payment periods in a never-ending cycle of payments.

• While fine amount

  • are meant to be determined by an individual’s financial circumstances, this system did not seem to work effectively in practice.

  • The imposition of other non means-tested financial charges alongside the fine, such as prosecution costs, often pushed the total amount owed to the court up from something affordable to an amount that felt impossible to pay in the time allowed.

  • Court fine enforcement action (which is subject to less regulation than commercial credit recovery), particularly the threat of bailiffs, added further financial and wellbeing strains, especially for those already struggling to make insufficient household budgets last.

  • Magistrates suggested that they often felt their hands were tied, leaving them to sentence people on low incomes to fines, the magistrates knew they could not pay.

  • Many interviewees felt that a fine was, in theory, an appropriate punishment for the offence they committed, but the confusing processes of the current system often meant that the total amount they eventually needed to pay was seen as excessive

London: The Centre for Justice Innovation, 2024, 41p.

By Michele Cadigan and Gabriela Kirk

Research on court-imposed monetary sanctions has not yet fully examined the impact that processes used to manage court debt have on individuals’ lives. Drawing from both interviews and ethnographic data in Illinois and Washington State, we examine how the court’s management of justice-related debt affect labor market experiences. We conceptualize these managerial practices as procedural pressure points or mechanisms embedded within these processes that strain individuals’ ability to access and maintain stable employment. We find that, as a result, courts undermine their own goal of recouping costs and trap individuals in a cycle of court surveillance.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences March 2020, 6 (1) 113-131; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.202

By Johann D. Gaebler ,Phoebe Barghouty,Sarah Vicol,Cheryl Phillips,Sharad Goel

In almost every state, courts can jail those who fail to pay fines, fees, and other court debts—even those resulting from traffic or other non-criminal violations. While debtors’ prisons for private debts have been widely illegal in the United States for more than 150 years, the effect of courts aggressively pursuing unpaid fines and fees is that many Americans are nevertheless jailed for unpaid debts. However, heterogeneous, incomplete, and siloed records have made it difficult to understand the scope of debt imprisonment practices. We culled data from millions of records collected through hundreds of public records requests to county jails to produce a first-of-its-kind dataset documenting imprisonment for court debts in three U.S. states. Using these data, we present novel order-of-magnitude estimates of the prevalence of debt imprisonment, finding that between 2005 and 2018, around 38,000 residents of Texas and around 8,000 residents of Wisconsin were jailed each year for failure to pay (FTP), with the median individual spending one day in jail in both Texas and Wisconsin. Drawing on additional data on FTP warrants from Oklahoma, we also find that unpaid fines and fees leading to debt imprisonment most commonly come from traffic offenses, for which a typical Oklahoma court debtor owes around $250, or $500 if a warrant was issued for their arrest.

PLoS One. 2023; 18(9): e0290397.

By Colleen Chien, Alexandra George, Srihari Shekhar, and Robert Apel

As states pass reforms to reduce the size of their prison populations, the number of Americans physically incarcerated has declined. However, the number of people whose employment and related opportunities are limited due to their criminal records continues to grow. Another sanction that curtails economic opportunity is the loss of one’s driver’s license for reasons unrelated to driving. While many states have “second chance” laws on the books that provide, e.g. expungement or driver’s license restoration, a growing body of research has documented large “second chance gaps” between eligibility and delivery of relief due to the poor administration of second chance relief. This paper is a first attempt to measure the cost of these “paper prisons” of limited economic opportunity due to expungable records and restorable licenses, in terms of annual lost earnings. Analyzing the literature, we estimate the annual earnings loss associated with misdemeanor and felony convictions to be $5,100 and $6,400, respectively, and that of a suspended license to be $12,700.

We use Texas as a case study for comparing the cost (in terms of lost earnings) of the state’s “paper prisons” – living with sealable records or restorable licenses – with the cost of its physical prisons. In Texas, individuals with criminal convictions may seal their records after a waiting period. But analyzing administrative data, we find that approximately 95% of people eligible for relief have not accessed it. This leaves 670,000 people in the “second chance sealing gap” eligible for but not accessing second chance relief, translating into an annual earnings loss of about $3.5 billion. Similarly, people that have lost driver’s licenses are entitled to get their licenses restored under the law (in the form of “occupational driver’s licenses,” or “ODLs”) in order to drive to work or school. But using a similar approach, we find that about 80% of the people that appear eligible for restored driver’s licenses in Texas have not received them. This translates into about 430,000 people who needlessly lack licenses and a lower-bounds earnings loss of about $5.5 billion. Based on these figures, we find the cumulative annual earnings loss associated with Texas’s “paper prisons” of limited economic opportunity due to lost but restorable licenses and convictions records eligible for sealing to be comparable with, and likely more than, the yearly cost to Texas of managing its physical prisons of around $3.6 billion.

64 ARIZ. L. REV. 675 (2022). Santa Clara Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper

By Lindsay Bass-Patel and Angie Weis Gammell

Courts across the country, including those in North Carolina, impose financial obligations on people when they are convicted of a crime or infraction. These court imposed financial obligations include fines, a form of financial punishment, and fees, which fund government services. North Carolina has increased its reliance on fines and fees as a revenue source over the past 20 years. 1 This practice harms many North Carolinians and is also an inefficient financial strategy for the state. In the past decade, other states have begun to reevaluate their use of fines and fees. North Carolina can find guidance from states like Louisiana, which has eliminated fees for juveniles, and Georgia, which has enacted guidelines to determine a person’s ability to pay before imposing fines or fees. Fines and fees disproportionately impact poor people and people of color, and in so doing, burden them with paying for government services that support all members of society. North Carolina courts often impose fines and fees without considering a person’s ability to pay them. When a person does not have the financial means to pay, they face difficult, perilous choices. These choices result in some people paying fines or fees rather than buying groceries or medicine; some people losing their driver’s license for not paying the fines or fees; and some people being taken to jail for failing to pay even when the original infraction had no risk of jail time. 2 Furthermore, fines and fees are an unreliable and ineffective revenue source. The time and resources spent trying to collect court fines and fees can cost more than the money collected. 3 The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (“AOC”) does not publicly share information on the total amount of fines and fees imposed or outstanding. Instead, the publicly shared financial data shows the amount people pay to the Clerks of Superior Court. According to this information, the state recouped $204.9 million in fiscal year 2020-2021 from fines and fees in criminal cases, which constituted only 0.3% of the state’s revenue for that year. 4 North Carolina must examine its use of fines and fees, including the harm it has on residents, their families, and their communities; eliminate fees; and reduce fines imposed in criminal court.

Durham, NC: Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, 2023. 36p.

By Karin D. Martin, Bryan L. Sykes, Sarah Shannon, Frank Edwards, and Alexes Harris

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.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2018. 1:471–95

By Vittorio Nastasi

Across the country, state and local governments use court fines and fees as a source of revenue to fund public services. Individuals may be charged fines and fees for any criminal or civil infraction, but outstanding court debts overwhelmingly stem from traffic citations. This “taxation by citation” is not only a threat to individual liberty, but can also undermine public safety and result in fiscal instability. While fines and fees are often discussed in tandem, their purposes and legal implications differ. Fines are imposed upon conviction and are primarily intended to deter and punish crimes or municipal code violations. They are usually set in statute and vary depending on the severity of an offense. Fines are appropriate and beneficial when used as an intermediate form of punishment in place of incarceration.1 However, fines are commonly used in addition to incarceration, rather than being an alternative. Fees, on the other hand, are solely intended to raise revenue. They essentially shift the costs of the justice system away from taxpayers and onto defendants. These “user fees” are imposed by state and local governments to charge individuals for the cost of their constitutional right to due process. Various court fees add to—and often exceed—the initial fine charged for an offense. Common examples of fees include court-appointed attorney fees, supervision fees, administrative fees, jury fees, and drug testing fees. When individuals are unable to pay fees in a timely manner, they can face additional “poverty fees” in the form of late fees, collection fees, and payment plan fees.2 Typically, revenue derived from fines and fees is used to fund court operations, including salary and personnel costs. However, some governments rely on courts to generate revenue for other services as well. In some cases, the revenue is earmarked for a specific purpose related to traffic safety or law enforcement. In others, it goes to a government’s general fund or to purposes wholly unrelated to the justice system. In the case of traffic tickets in Florida, most of the revenue generated stays with the local government that issued the citation. Some of the money is also distributed to the state for general revenue and a variety of state trust funds and programs, including: • Emergency Medical Services • Brain and Spinal Cord Rehabilitation • Florida Endowment for Vocational Rehabilitation • Child Welfare Training • Juvenile Justice • Foster Care Citizen Review Panel • State Criminal Justice Programs3 While funding for the state court system is constitutionally required to come from state revenues appropriated by general law, a large share of funding for the state’s clerks of courts is provided by filing fees, service charges, and court costs that are collected from individuals when they interact with the court system. Consequently, the clerks of courts in Florida get much of their revenue from traffic enforcement. There are two main problems with using fines and fees for government revenue: (1) they impose disproportionate burdens on low-income individuals and (2) they are not a stable or reliable source of revenue.

Tallahassee, FL; James Madison Institute, 2022. 6p.

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

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 Christian Traxler and Libor Dusek

We estimate the effect of the level of fines on payment compliance and revenues collected from speeding tickets. Exploiting discontinuous increases in fines at speed cutoffs and reform induced variation in these discontinuities, we implement two complementary regression discontinuity designs. The results consistently document small payment responses: a 10 percent increase in the fine (i.e. the payment obligation) induces a 1.2 percentage point decline in timely payments. The implied revenue elasticity is about 0.9. Expressed in absolute terms, a one dollar increase in the fine translates into a roughly 60 cent increase in payments

Unpublished Paper: (November 19, 2022).

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  Mitali Nagrecha

  Over the last few decades, advocates in the United States have exposed the injustices of high fines and fees that courts charge people sentenced to criminal and civil violations. Courts impose fines as punishment for offenses— often in addition to other punishment such as probation or jail—and they charge fees (also referred to as costs or surcharges) to fund the court and other government services. The number of fees and the amounts assessed have been increasing over the last decades, in part because fees are being used to generate revenue for local and state governments. Rarely, if ever, do U.S. courts consider people’s ability to pay before imposing these sanctions.3 When people are  unable to pay, they can become trapped in the system, facing a cycle of consequences including additional fees, court hearings, warrants, arrest, and incarceration.4 In response to advocacy exposing how these punitive practices harm people and communities, jurisdictions have begun to reform. The most direct efforts seek to repeal revenue-raising fines and fees. More common, however, is the adoption of requirements that courts assess people’s ability to pay at the  sentencing hearing, and/or before punishing people for nonpayment.5 Though high monetary sanctions are prevalent in all courts, much of this reform attention has focused on misdemeanor courts that sentence ordinance violations and misdemeanor crimes. This is because fines are a common component of misdemeanor criminal sentences, and because  there are clearer conflicts of interest inherent in the structure of some lower level courts that rely on fines and fees to fund their operations.6 It is in this reform context that academics, advocates, and government leaders have considered day fines as a potential model for the United States. Day fines are used in over 30 countries in Europe and Latin America to  calculate fine amounts that are tailored to people’s ability to pay.7 Day fines are set using a two-part inquiry. Courts first consider the nature and seriousness of the offense, measured in units or days. For example, a common low-level    misdemeanor may receive 20 units. Courts then calculate how much the person can pay per day/unit  based on their individual financial circumstances. The amount a person must pay per day is called the daily rate. Someone earning very little may be required to pay $5 per unit for a total fine of $100, while someone earning more may  be required to pay $20 per unit for a total fine of $400. Day fines provide a framework for setting a fine based not just on  the nature of the offense, but also on how much a fine will impact the person given their financial circumstances. The  resulting fines are theoretically more fair because people of different means experience the fines similarly. A $400 fine affects a person earning that amount per week differently than a person who earns that amount in one day. In the United  States, day fines hold the promise not only of making fines more fair, but also of making fines affordable to avoid the spiral  of negative consequences that people face upon nonpayment. Despite the theoretical resonance of day fines as a  potential solution, there has been very limited information available about how this model works in practice. This project  fills this knowledge gap.  

Cambridge, MA: Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School. 2020. 156p.

By Jay Gormley

• Criminal fines are the most common criminal sanction and account for about 75% of principal sanctions issued by courts. As a principal sanction, fines are most commonly used for relatively less serious offences where an out of court disposal (OOCD) or discharge is not appropriate or possible. However, fines can also be used as a complementary sanction to another disposal - such as a community order for more serious offences.

• There is a need for the law to provide better clarity concerning the most appropriate role for criminalisation. Most notably, there could be better clarity about the relationship between criminal fines issued by courts and non-criminal fines issued by criminal justice personnel (e.g. police officers and prosecutors) by way of an OOCD.

• In the past, defaulting on a fine frequently resulted in the next step being a custodial sentence. Today, other sentencing disposals have to be considered first, ameliorating this issue. However, currently, there is no available data on how many people default on a fine, are given another order (e.g. a community order) which they also fail to comply with, and are ultimately given a custodial sentence for what was initially a finable offence. This matter requires urgent clarification and it should also be investigated whether it contributes to the high number of short custodial sentences.

• Fines, more than any other disposal, raise questions of fairness given the socio-economic inequality in society. Without care, fines risk disproportionately punishing the poor who may suffer more from a fine of a given amount. The Sentencing Council provides crucial guidance in this respect, but it could be taken further.
London: Sentencing Academy, 2022. 20p.

By Devah Pager, Rebecca Goldstein, Helen Ho, and Bruce Western 

  Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection.

American Sociological Review, Volume 87, Issue 3, 2022.

By Lindsay Bing, Becky Pettit, Ilya Slavinski

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.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 118–136  , 2022.

By Brittany Friedman, Alexes Harris, Beth M. Huebner, Karin D. Martin, Becky Pettit, Sarah K.S. Shannon, Bryan L. Sykes

Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals’ rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(1): 221–43, 2022

By Mary Pattillo and Gabriela Kirk

Monetary sanctions include fines, fees, restitution, surcharges, interest, and other costs imposed on people who are convicted of crimes ranging from traffic violations to violent felonies.  We analyze how people in the court system theorize about monetary sanctions with regards to four kinds of justice: constitutional, retributive, procedural, and distributive justice.  Drawing on qualitative interviews with sixty-eight people sentenced to pay monetary sanctions in Illinois, we identify five themes that illuminate how respondents think about these forms of justice: monetary sanctions are: (1) justifiable punishment, (2) impossible to pay due to poverty, (3) double punishment, (4) extortion, and (5) collected by an opaque and greedy state.  We find that for defendants in the criminal justice system, monetary sanctions serve some retributive aims, but do not align with the other three domains of justice.  We discuss the policy implications of these findings.

UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review  Volume 4, Issue 1, 2020.

By Alexes Harris, Mary Pattillo, Bryan L. Sykes

Monetary sanctions, also known as legal financial obligations (LFOs), are a highly consequential yet underexplored element of the criminal legal system. LFOs consist of fines, fees, costs, restitution, surcharges, and other financial penalties that are imposed on individuals when they encounter the criminal legal system. This contact can occur via traffic citation, or misdemeanor, juvenile, and felony conviction. Although indistinguishable for the people who are required to pay them, monetary sanctions are variably understood as punishments prescribed by state statutes and local codes, restitution for victims of crime, user fees to recoup system expenses or pay for services rendered, and additional charges for failure to pay. Most monetary sanctions are sentenced on conviction or citation, but some pretrial costs—such as jail booking fees, electronic monitoring, or public defender services in the absence of a conviction—can be passed on to defendants as well.1 These fines and fees are experienced as bills and debts for those on whom they are imposed and as revenue sources for the courts, agencies, jurisdictions, and states that collect them. Although the practice of imposing fines and fees on convicted persons has existed in law since the Magna Carta in 1215, research shows that the prevalence and amounts of monetary sanctions have grown over the last five decades across federal, state, and local governments.

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences January 2022, 8 (1) 1-33