By Tanisha Pierrette, Senior Research Analyst & Lillian Patil, Senior Analyst, State & Local Budgets
This is part 3 of our six-part blog series, Reforming the Revenue Machine: An Advocate’s Guide to to Court Fines and Fees. Each post unpacks findings from Imposing Instability — our national report on how courts use fines and fees to raise revenue — and turns them into tools you can use in campaigns for reform. In this series, you’ll find clear takeaways, examples of what’s happening on the ground, and strategies to strengthen reform efforts in your community.
Missed a post? You can read the full series here.
If caseloads are shrinking across the country, why are courts imposing more fines and fees? In Imposing Instability, we compared how much money courts imposed in fines and fees to the volume of cases they processed between FY2018 and FY2022, using data from the Court Statistics Project (CSP). The CSP collects and publishes caseload data submitted by court systems in every state. That allowed us to look at national trends and ask a simple question: as caseloads decrease, do fine and fee assessments also decrease? The answer was a troubling “no.”
While the median number of incoming cases dropped by 20 percent, the median amount of fines and fees imposed actually increased by 3 percent.
Shrinking caseloads mean that fewer people are being pulled into the criminal legal system each year, yet courts appear to be imposing more fines and fees on each individual case, thereby increasing the financial burden on each person navigating the courts to make up the difference.
The amount of fines and fees courts impose should track with the number of cases they handle. When it doesn’t, it indicates that revenue is driving decision-making — not justice.
Recognizing When Courts Prioritize Revenue Over Justice
Suppose you live in a city or county where the local government is directing its police force to write more tickets or use the courts — and the associated fees they charge — as a tool to bring in more revenue for the government. In that case, this affects you directly — even if you’ve never set foot in a courtroom. When local governments rely on monetary sanctions to fund themselves, they create financial incentives to police more aggressively, prosecute more harshly, and resist reforms that would reduce contact with the justice system. Revenue-driven policing and government reliance on fines and fees are common across the country, with Ferguson, Missouri, Brookside, Alabama, and Lexington, Mississippi being just some of the most infamous examples to have occurred in the last decade.
Research shows that jurisdictions relying more heavily on fine and fee revenue are less likely to focus on critical activities, such as clearing violent crime cases. This is because law enforcement staff must allocate their time to maximize revenue, rather than solving crimes. This is a clear public safety issue. In many communities, particularly those that are low-income or over-policed, reliance on fine and fee revenue leads to cycles of debt, bench warrants, increased court time, and incarceration over unpaid fines and fees.
Reliance on fines and fees revenue and the perverse incentives it instills into policing also erodes public trust in the courts and law enforcement. When government budgets depend on extracting money from people moving through the legal system—often those with the fewest resources—fairness is compromised from the start. As long as there’s a built-in financial incentive to impose monetary sanctions, justice system goals are tilted toward revenue generation rather than accountability or equity.
How Advocates Can Take Action
Advocates can use the caseload-to-imposition comparison in Imposing Instability to expose the growing financial pressure governments and courts are placing on people.
Step 1: Identify Trends in Your Community
Look for patterns over time: has your jurisdiction’s court caseload decreased while the total amount of fines and fees imposed has stayed flat or increased? This information may be available through public budget documents, annual court reports, or data requests to your state’s court administrator. Because CSP has your state-level caseload data, even if you can’t get it locally, you can still compare the state trend against whatever level of fine and fee imposition data you can gather.
Step 2: Investigate Your State, City, or County’s Reliance on Fines and Fees
Any dependence on fine and fee revenue is a warning sign, but a high level of dependence puts your community at extreme risk. Dependence can indicate systemic incentives to over-police, over-prosecute, or impose higher sanctions on the limited number of people still going through the system. You can also partner with local journalists, watchdog groups, public policy students, or budget analysts to help follow the money and spotlight jurisdictions where fines and fees are being used to plug budget holes. Advocates can use this data to argue for policy changes — like capping the percentage of revenue a jurisdiction can raise from monetary sanctions, or pushing for extensive fee elimination.
Step 3: Lay the Groundwork for Reform
With this evidence in hand, it’s time to start shaping your advocacy plan. As you formulate your strategy, it’s important to remember that revenue implications can play a key role in successfully advancing a campaign — particularly during uncertain times. For strategies on navigating such conversations with lawmakers, watch our webinar, Navigating the Revenue Impacts of Reform.
In your conversations, highlight the dangers of government reliance on fines and fees, and advocate for legislative appropriations as the primary means of court funding. This is a matter of institutional integrity — as long as there is a financial stake in every court case, justice remains out of reach.
Even in the absence of perfect data, the message is clear: courts are imposing more fines and fees on fewer cases. That’s a warning sign — and advocates can lead the charge to stop it.
Communities That Have Taken Action
- California: The California Legislature Assembly Bill (AB) 1869 (2020) and AB 177 (2021) eliminated many fees and allocated other monies to replace lost revenue—delinking legal financial obligations and court funding.
- Massachusetts (2013): The State Legislature also delinked fine and fee revenue and court funding by eliminating the state’s trial court retained revenue account, which partially financed trial court operations supported by fines and fees.
- Missouri (2015): Senate Bill 5 imposed a cap on the portion of a city’s annual general operating revenue derived from fines, bond forfeitures, and court costs related to municipal ordinance violations and minor traffic offenses. While Missouri’s 20 percent cap is still a worryingly high level of revenue from fines and fees, the creation of a cap in itself to ensure that revenue dependence on fines and fees does not continue unchecked is a first step in the right direction.
Stay tuned to this series for more insight on how to turn the data from Imposing Instability into action. Up next, we’ll explore the risks governments take when relying on revenue from fines and fees to fund government services and programs.