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Journal Article
Studying the System of Monetary Sanctions
2022
Overview
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 (Bannon, Nagrecha, and Diller 2010; Fergus 2018; Greenberg, Meredith, and Morse 2016; Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Harris 2016; Shapiro 2014; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2017).2The policy, legal, and social science literatures on monetary sanctions document critical features of this punishment schema (for an extensive review, see Martin et al. 2018; Martin 2020). Research shows that individuals struggle to pay their court debts, making it even more difficult to pay for essential expenses such as food, housing, health care, medicine, transportation, and childcare, thereby increasing stress (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Harris 2016; Pleggenkuhle 2018). This burden is not borne solely by those convicted of crimes but also by their family members and communities (deVuono-powell et al. 2015; Katzenstein and Waller 2015). Further, because people are not released from criminal legal supervision until their accounts are fully paid, monetary sanctions prolong supervision, make probation violations more likely, escalate sanctions for new criminal convictions, and result in incarceration for nonpayment (ACLU 2010; T. Atkinson 2016; Kohler-Hausmann 2018; Middlemass 2017; Western 2018). The racially disparate impact of monetary sanctions intensifies the aggressive policing of Black and Latinx neighborhoods because these groups typically find it more difficult to pay (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2011; Henrichson et al. 2017; Henricks and Harvey 2017; Piquero and Jennings 2017; Sances and You 2017; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2017). The criminal legal monitoring and collection of fines, fees, and other costs extends and deepens the punishment of nonpayers and individuals reentering society, and warps the very legal institutions that legislate and implement these practices (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010, 2011; Harris 2016; Pattillo and Kirk 2021).
