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Restitution as a social practice can simultaneously have a punitive effect and add to a person's criminal justice debt load, while maintaining a reparative and therefore restorative component. We use principles of restorative justice to assess restitution as a concept and a practice, drawing on data from a survey experiment administered to a nationally representative sample (n = 433). We find that the common and strongly preferred conception of restitution is \"direct,\" entailing a convicted person compensating a victim for quantifiable loss. Evidence from Victim Compensation Funds (VCFs) in all 50 states demonstrate the widespread use of \"indirect\" restitution, through which funds from various sources are distributed to qualifying victims. Broader trends in criminal justice policy related to the centering of the victim and a managerial approach to punishment help explain our findings. We conclude that the divergence between common conception and widespread practice indicates a need for a revised notion of restitution.

Using a comparative historical analysis of legislative transcripts and primary and secondary historical documents in Illinois and Michigan, we trace the adoption of a largely understudied form of monetary sanction: pay-to-stay fees. Pay-to-stay fees are financial commitments imposed by the state on incarcerated individuals for the day-to-day cost of their incarceration. Our study identified two mutually constitutive bureaucratic motivations for the adoption of these fees—austerity as the primary rationale and deservingness as a secondary rationale. This analysis highlights an earlier conceptualization of monetary sanctions as a means of revenue generation than has previously been explored. Our findings suggest that pay-to-stay fees originated in these states from broader debates about who is ultimately fiscally responsible for the welfare state and the soaring costs of maintaining the rehabilitative ideal. During periods of fiscal crisis, state legislators have consistently looked toward this type of monetary sanction as a means to fund the correctional system.

The importance of monetary sanctions as a topic of sociological inquiry derives from both their ubiquity in American criminal justice and the socioeconomic realities of many people, especially those ensnared in the criminal legal system. This essay reviews the literature on monetary sanctions across various fields, including applied research, economics, criminology, political science, public policy, and sociology. Early approaches tended to be more system evaluations, whereas later work emphasizes the structural determinants of monetary sanctions and their impacts. Insights from research across time and discipline foreshadow the contemporary debate about monetary sanctions and are important precursors to the work in this volume.

Due to increasing recognition of the collateral consequences associated with monetary sanctions, fees have begun to occupy a prominent place in critical debates. This is especially true for community corrections, where multiple fees are assessed and collected. However, the agency-level perspective has largely been omitted, especially regarding how the current landscape may facilitate—or impede—reform. Using self-report data from a state-wide sample of Chiefs of Probation and Parole, this paper provides a new perspective on the complex interplay between the policy and practices surrounding monetary sanctions. Responses suggest that the practices and philosophies surrounding the collection of fees vary significantly between jurisdictions. This obligation is also reported to challenge the traditional roles of probation officers by limiting discretion and complicating the existing tensions between their treatment and control-oriented responsibilities. Some respondents indicated meaningful reliance on fee revenue for operational and treatment budgets. Implications for policy reform, especially considering the variation observed in this single state, are discussed.

Investigations in Ferguson, Missouri, revealed that many individuals, particularly Black people, entered the criminal justice system for relatively minor offenses, missed court appearances, or failure to pay fines. Municipal courts were focused on revenue generation, which led to aggressive enforcement of municipal codes. Although subsequent reforms were passed, little is known about whether and how the legislative changes influenced the law-in-action in the municipal courts. Using data from qualitative interviews with St. Louis area residents and regional court actors, as well as court observations, this article documents the legal structure of municipal courts in the region after Ferguson. We address how the parochial nature of municipal courts in St. Louis County perpetuates the financial marginalization of residents through the layering of punishment, and how the state legal structure further facilitates control, even after reform.

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.

Probation is the most commonly imposed correctional sanction, is often accompanied by supplementary costs, and can be operated by the state or private companies. Private probation is a unique sanction used in lower courts, most often for misdemeanor offenses, and is managed by third-party actors. We focus on documenting the process and unique costs of private probation, including the rituals of compliance and proportionality of punishment. We use data from interviews with individuals on private probation and local criminal justice officials as well as evidence from court ethnographies in Georgia and Missouri. For individuals on private probation, payment of monetary sanctions is a crucial way of demonstrating compliance. Yet the financial burden of added costs for supervision and monitoring creates substantial challenges.

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.

States increasingly look to incarcerated individuals as a source of revenue to alleviate the fiscal burden of incarceration, which results in suing prisoners for these costs. Through lawsuit complaints, states claim they have suffered damages and seek reimbursement from incarcerated individuals through pay-to-stay fees. Drawing from an original dataset consisting of 102 civil complaints from Illinois, we examine how the state constructs damage, harm, and willfulness through pay-to-stay lawsuits. We find that the state achieves this beneficial outcome by labeling incarcerated individuals as willful nonpayers and thereby morally responsible for what it terms damages suffered. Our empirical and theoretical contributions position civil lawsuits as part of imagining incarcerated individuals as fiscally responsible for their incarceration within a rentseeking society, contextualizing the social linkages between willfulness, legal moralism, and perpetual indebtedness.

Research on punishment and inequality finds that people with criminal records routinely avoid systems of surveillance. Yet scholarship on monetary sanctions shows that many people experiencing poverty with criminal legal system debt are also involved with the state in other domains of social life. How can these literatures be resolved? In this article, we posit that past research can be reconciled through a focus on financial double-dealing—disparate and contradictory economic entanglements that redistribute welfare resources from individuals to the criminal legal system and its institutional affiliates. Drawing on nationally representative survey data, as well as unique data collected on people with monetary sanctions in seven states, we find that individuals and families receiving cash and noncash public assistance are significantly more likely to owe monetary sanctions and are less likely to pay them. We discuss the implications of multiple-system involvement for ongoing surveillance.