By Hernandez D. Stroud, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Ram Subramanian

Few issues have received more sustained attention from U.S. policymakers over the last decade than the country’s unique overuse of incarceration. After decades of growth in imprisonment rates, states have attempted to reduce the number of people behind bars. Their reforms have been driven by a recognition that incarceration is expensive and often counterproductive and by research demonstrating that many people can be safely supervised in the community

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law , 2023. 24p.

By The American Bar Association, Working Group on Building Public Trust in the American Justice System

Adopted at the 2022 ABA Annual Meeting, the Ten Principles on Reducing Mass Incarceration articulate the critical steps necessary to help to combat the drivers of mass incarceration and ultimately reduce the number of people in jails and prisons nationwide.

Chicago: ABA, 2022. 61p.

By Nicole D. Porter and Morgan McLeod

Voting eligibility and a person’s involvement in the criminal legal system have a historical but unnatural association in the United States. Some state laws dating back over 100 years, and motivated by racist ideology, permanently ban people convicted of a felony from voting, and almost all states have long prevented voting by people in prison. Over the last 50 years the country’s investment in mass incarceration not only staggeringly increased the prison population and the community of people with a criminal record but increased the number of people banned from voting due to a felony conviction. As a result, over 4.6 million Americans with a felony conviction were disenfranchised as of 2022, disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx residents. Despite the stark consequences of mass incarceration and voter disenfranchisement, the advocacy of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated activists, organizers, legislative champions, and others have successfully fought to pass reforms to expand voting rights to justice-impacted individuals. These changes, both administrative and statutory in recent decades, coupled by recent modest declines in the population of incarcerated people and those under community supervision reduced the total number of people disenfranchised by 24% since reaching its peak in 2016. OVERVIEW Understanding the origins of this progress to restore voting rights is beneficial for democracy and justice. This report provides a state-by-state accounting of the changes to voting rights for people with felony convictions and measures its impact.5 Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions or amended policies to guarantee ballot access. These reforms were achieved through various mechanisms, including legislative reform, executive action, and ballot measures. The reforms include: • restoration of voting rights to persons in prison in Washington, DC; • expansion of voting rights to some or all persons on felony probation or parole in 12 states; and • increased accessibility for persons seeking rights restoration in 14 states. Over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote since 1997. These changes to expand and guarantee voting rights demonstrate national momentum to reform the nation’s restrictive and racially discriminatory voting laws.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 28p.

By Anita Knudsen, Lenny Roth

Key points • Overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the NSW criminal justice system continues to worsen. Almost one third of people in prison in NSW are Aboriginal. The increase in imprisonment has been most acute in remand, with almost 40% of Aboriginal people in prison on remand. • Record high numbers of people in prison, and growing awareness of the social and economic costs of prison, have intensified public discussions about alternatives to prison. • The main framework for reducing Aboriginal incarceration nationally and in NSW is the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which includes a target to reduce the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people by at least 15% by 2031. • The NSW Closing the Gap Implementation Plan 2022–2024 emphasises the need for Aboriginal leadership, expertise and participation in strategies to reduce incarceration. These measures will take different times to mature and scale. • An important consideration identified by stakeholders is the need to consider how criminal justice legislation and policy contributes to increased numbers of Aboriginal people in prison and overrepresentation at every stage of the criminal justice process. • Inquiries and research have proposed a range of actions across prevention, early intervention, diversion from the criminal justice system, non-custodial sentencing options and post-release support specific to Aboriginal people.

Sydney: State of New South Wales through the Parliament of New South Wales, 2023. 44p,

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.

By Judith Resnick, et al.

n the last decades, growing numbers of people have sought to use courts, government budgets have declined, new technologies have emerged, arrest and detention rates have risen, and arguments have been leveled that private resolutions are preferable to public adjudication. Lawsuits challenge the legality of fee structures, money bail, and the imposition of fines. States have chartered task forces to propose changes, and new research has identified the effects of the current system on low-income communities and on people of color. The costs imposed through fees, surcharges, fines, and bail affect the ability of plaintiffs and defendants to seek justice and to be treated justly.

This volume, prepared for the 21st Annual Arthur Liman Center Colloquium, explores the mechanisms for financing court systems and the economic challenges faced by judiciaries and by litigants. We address how constitutional democracies can meet their obligations to make justice accessible to disputants and to make fair treatment visible to the public. Our goals are to understand the dimensions of the problems, the inter-relationships among civil, criminal, and administrative processes, and the opportunities for generating the political will to bring about reform.

Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 644. New Haven, CT: Yale Law School, 2020. 223p

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 Cristina Mendez, Jeffrey Selbin and Gus Tupper

In 2019, the Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) published a report acknowledging Idaho’s reliance on fines and fees as a source of court funding. According to the report Idaho residents owed a total of more than $268 million in delinquent court debt. In this article, the authors further examine the state’s reliance on monetary sanctions, focusing on fees in the juvenile delinquency system, and recommending a pathway to ending the harmful impact of monetary sanctions.

57 Idaho L. Rev. (2021).

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 Public Safety Canada

Indigenous offenders continue to be disproportionately represented at all levels of the Canadian criminal justice system and the federal government is committed to addressing this over-representation of Indigenous people. The Indigenous Community Corrections Initiative (ICCI) was created to help close the gaps in service for Indigenous Peoples in the criminal justice system and address the government commitment to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action, in particular actions 30 and 32 regarding the over-representation of Indigenous offenders in custody. The objectives of the Initiative are to support the development of alternatives to custody and to provide reintegration support for Indigenous offenders. Public Safety Canada (PS) was allocated $10M over five years in Budget 2017 for the ICCI. While the target population for the Initiative was Indigenous federal offenders, the Department accepted proposals that included Indigenous adult offenders who had been convicted of an offence with a sentence of less than two years (generally classified as provincial offenders). The call for proposals closed in November 2017 and PS received 126 submissions. An initial assessment screened out 62 proposals that did not meet the objectives of the ICCI and a secondary assessment of the remaining proposals ended with 15 projects selected for funding. Due to the program being approved late in the 2017-18 fiscal year, the program was not able to fund projects until 2018-19. After a successful re-profiling of funds, the ICCI was able to add an additional project in 2018 which brought the total to 16 funded projects.

Ottawa: Public Safety Canada, 2021. 30p.

By Clarence Okoh & Isabel Coronado

Community supervision, or community corrections, refers to a court-ordered period of correctional supervision served outside of a correctional facility. Some policymakers insist that “community supervision” is a viable path to combat mass incarceration. However, mounting evidence makes clear that “mass supervision” is not a solution; instead, it is a leading driver of mass criminalization, especially in Black communities and other communities of color. Mass supervision’s broad range of economic, legal, and social disadvantages trap millions of individuals in cycles of carceral predation and second-class citizenship. To address this crisis, policymakers must envision an entirely new paradigm to support the needs of individuals returning home from correctional facilities. This paradigm must break cycles of correctional punishment while insisting on systemic redress and repair for communities that have carried the heaviest burdens of mass criminalization.

This report offers insights to help policymakers create that new paradigm. For this report, we interviewed over two dozen community advocates, practitioners, and systems-impacted individuals concentrated in three states–Arizona, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin–to understand better how state community supervision systems impede or support economic opportunity, with a particular focus on parole supervision.

What emerged from those conversations was a consensus about the need for a new legal and policy paradigm that we term “community repair.” Community repair offers an entirely different relationship between the state and systems-impacted individuals. Community repair is an anti-carceral policy approach that advocates for removing corrections and law enforcement from the reentry process altogether—recognizing that public investments in meeting basic needs such as employment, housing, and health care hold the most significant promise in disrupting mass supervision and incarceration. This framework goes further by insisting that the state must address present harms and redress the multigenerational harms of mass supervision on families and communities impacted by the criminal legal system.

Based on our conversations with stakeholders and an extensive scan of policy developments at the state and national levels, we offer recommendations for harm reduction and systems transformation of community supervision.

Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy - CLASP, 2022. 28p.

By Beth M. Huebner, Lee Ann Slocum, Andrea Giuffre, Kimberly Kras, and Bobby Boxerman

This project focuses on the St. Louis County Jail which is managed by the Department of Justice Services and serves as the central detention facility for the region. St. Louis County, Missouri provides an ideal location to study the jail-probation nexus. St. Louis County is a large and diverse community. Sixty-eight percent of the population is white and 25% Black, with a small (less than 3%) Hispanic and Latinx population. The county poverty rate of 9.7% is slightly lower than the national average. The Missouri Department of Corrections (MoDOC) is a centralized system, and the St Louis County offices supervise 2,481 clients on probation. The data used in this report include administrative data from the years 2010-2020 that were provided by Justice Services. The process and outcome analyses are also informed by data collected from qualitative interviews with individuals on probation (n=47) and local criminal justice stakeholders (n=17).

Safety & Justice Challenge, 2023. 13p.

By M. Camello, M., R. Shute, & J.D. Ropero-Miller

Individuals on community supervision are often required to abstain from alcohol and drug use and are typically subjected to substance use monitoring to verify sobriety, as a condition of their supervision. Providing reliable, timely, and cost- effective monitoring of alcohol and drug use for persons on community supervision as a condition of their release is a serious challenge given high-volume caseloads and concerns with public safety. This technology brief highlights technologies and solutions used to monitor alcohol and drug use for persons on community supervision. This is the third document in a four-part series on technologies to support the monitoring and supervision of individuals on pretrial release, probation, and parole (i.e., community supervision).

Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International. 2023. 22p.

By Donata Favretto, Cindi Visentin, Anna Aprile, Claudio Terranova, Alessandro Cinquetti

The most effective therapy for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) involves the use of Food and Drug Administration-approved medications—methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Despite evidence that this approach, known as medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), reduces relapse and saves lives, the vast majority of jails and prisons do not offer this treatment. This brief examines what policymakers should consider when exploring how to best manage OUD in incarcerated populations.

It helps to first answer this question: How common is OUD in incarcerated populations? Data from 2007-2009 (the most recent available) showed that more than half of individuals in state prisons or those with jail sentences met the criteria for a non-alcohol and nicotine-related substance use disorder (SUD), meaning a problematic pattern of using a drug that results in impairment in daily life or noticeable distress, compared with only 5 percent of adults in the general population.

The gold standard of care is MOUD. In community-based settings, such as opioid treatment programs and primary care facilities, methadone and buprenorphine have been proved to reduce overdose deaths and illicit opioid use as well as the transmission of infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. A growing body of literature also exists on the benefits of naltrexone, the third Food and Drug Administration-approved medication.

Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2020. 22p.

By Pew Trust

The most effective therapy for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) involves the use of Food and Drug Administration-approved medications—methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Despite evidence that this approach, known as medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), reduces relapse and saves lives, the vast majority of jails and prisons do not offer this treatment. This brief examines what policymakers should consider when exploring how to best manage OUD in incarcerated populations.

It helps to first answer this question: How common is OUD in incarcerated populations? Data from 2007-2009 (the most recent available) showed that more than half of individuals in state prisons or those with jail sentences met the criteria for a non-alcohol and nicotine-related substance use disorder (SUD), meaning a problematic pattern of using a drug that results in impairment in daily life or noticeable distress, compared with only 5 percent of adults in the general population.

The gold standard of care is MOUD. In community-based settings, such as opioid treatment programs and primary care facilities, methadone and buprenorphine have been proved to reduce overdose deaths and illicit opioid use as well as the transmission of infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. A growing body of literature also exists on the benefits of naltrexone, the third Food and Drug Administration-approved medication.

By Miranda Davies, Rachel Hutchings and Eilís Keeble

There were 11,494 people under 25 years of age in young offender institutions and prisons in England and Wales as of 31 December 2022, representing 14% of the total population in custody. While the number of children (under 18) in secure settings has fallen sharply over the past 15 years, very serious challenges remain over the use of force in the children’s secure estate, with ongoing concern over children being held in solitary confinement, some for extended periods. From a legal perspective, young people are treated as adults from the age of 18 within the criminal justice system, but there is recognition of the needs of 18- to 25-year-olds as ‘young adults’ (see the work of t2a.org.uk), distinct from the needs of children or other adults. This analysis uses routinely collected hospital data to look at the service-use patterns of children and young adults aged 25 and under in young offender institutions and prisons in England. We engaged with experts and looked at the literature to consider this in the context of the key health care needs of young people. Looking across the children’s secure estate as well as the adult estate provides a novel perspective on the key health care issues for young people, allowing us to compare experiences in the so-called ‘children and young people secure estate’, which caters for those aged 18 and under and is run as a distinct part of the custodial estate, with those in the adult estate, which manages young adults alongside prisoners in older age groups. Understanding how health care access and needs differ is important, because the distinction between the two parts of the system is becoming increasingly blurred. Recently, population pressures in the adult estate have led to an increase in the number of young people aged 18 or over in the children’s secure estate, which will drastically alter the age profile of the children’s secure estate population.

A summary of the key findings and some considerations for policy-makers are provided below. We found that some of the biggest problems affecting the adult prison estate – violence and self-harm – have a disproportionate impact on young adults. We consider how the prison service can meet the needs of young people in custodial settings, and the benefits of providing tailored support for young adults in particular.

London: Nuffield Trust, 2023. 55p.

By Jennifer Peirce, Tara Dhanraj Roden, Sandhya Kajeepeta, Elizabeth Swavola, and Jesmeen Grewal

This report presents an analysis of women’s experiences with the local criminal legal system in Buncombe County, North Carolina: their pathways into and out of the jail, their living conditions and concerns during detention, and their perspectives on how services and systems in the county can improve. The underlying research project was part of the broader jail reduction work of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) network. In 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) selected Buncombe County as a Safety and Justice Challenge site with which to partner in identifying drivers of growth within the women’s jail population and opportunities to reduce the number of women in jail. Buncombe County has a population of 269,452 (as of April 2020) and covers 656 square miles, including the City of Asheville.1 The findings in this report are based on administrative data from the jail (January 2017– April 2021); surveys with 40 women, representing nearly all the women who were held in the jail in September 2021; and interviews with 21 women conducted by Vera staff via video calls. Although the findings are responsive and specific to the needs of women in Buncombe County, many of the recommendations, if implemented, can benefit all people who are involved in the local criminal legal system.+ Broadly, this report finds that women’s pathways into jail in Buncombe County—in line with national patterns—are shaped by economic instability and laws and policies that criminalize acts of survival and acts related to substance dependency.2 In general, there is an excessive use of police, jail detention, and community supervision for low-level charges that do not pose a public safety risk. There is a clear opportunity to reduce the use of criminal legal system resources to respond to these situations and invest instead in supportive community-based services, especially for women. The key findings and recommendations from this work are grouped into six themes: 1. the criminalization of poverty, 2. bail, 3. community supervision, 4. substance use, 5. jail conditions and costs, and 6. interagency coordination and communication.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2022. 55p.

By Hilde T. Werminka, A. A. J. Bloklanda,b, J. Beenc, P. M. Schuyt, . N. Tollenaare and R. Apel;

Noncustodial sanctions may present an attractive way to reduce the prison population rate, but only when noncustodial sanc-tions meet custodial ones in terms of deterring recidivism. Using administrative criminal records data of all individuals convicted in the Netherlands in 2012, this study examines the effects of short-term imprisonment versus noncustodial sanctions on crime. We employ an instrumental variables approach to account for selection processes and to produce consistent estimates of the effects of imprisonment. Findings indicate that being sentenced to prison rather than a noncustodial sanction increases the prevalence of recidivism by 10 percentage points and increases recidivism rates by 1.07 registered crimes during a follow-up period of three years. Treatment effect heterogeneity analyses show that the detri-mental impact of imprisonment is most pronounced for first-time prisoners, and adult offenders, compared to repeat prisoners and young adult offenders.IntroductionReducing the prison population is one of the biggest challenges faced in the criminal justice system across countries worldwide. There are many good reasons to exercise restraint when it comes to imprisonment. For one, imprisoning people is an expensive enterprise, and the costs of imprisonment typically weigh heavy on the criminal justice budget (e.g. Phelps & Pager, 2016). To the extent that imprisonment maintains or even increases marginalization of the imprisoned population following their release, these direct costs may be dwarfed by imprisonment’s indirect societal costs

Justice Quarterly, April 2023.