As jurisdictions become more aware of the negative consequences of imposing unmanageable financial sanctions, there has been an increase in the number of jurisdictions that are implementing or adopting graduated sanctions. Graduating fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution involves accounting for a person’s sources of income and living expenses to determine their ability to pay, then reducing sanctions to a manageable amount. This article assesses the benefits of graduated economic sanctions to people, their families, and the criminal legal system through an abolitionist lens. The authors conclude the piece by outlining additional reforms to be adopted in conjunction with graduating sanctions in order to reach the goals of structural transformation.
You can read the full text of the article here.
Highlights:
- A push to create new, and improve existing graduation mechanisms has come from the public concern regarding the treatment of poor people and the findings by many state and federal courts that considering the effect of economic sanctions is constitutionally required.
- The goal of graduation mechanisms is to ensure that economic sanctions do not place people and their families in a state of economic instability that limits their access to basic human needs.
- Graduating sanctions aids the abolitionist goal of dismantling the caracal state by reducing economic sanctions to a manageable amount and alleviating the burdens of the punishment, limiting the duration of time that people fall under the thumb of the carceral state, and reducing the likelihood that the negative consequences of nonpayment occur, while depleting a source of its funding.
- Graduation also aids the abolitionist goal of creating systems of transformative justice by increasing revenues and funds to be used to support social services rather than funding criminal legal systems.
- Other potential outcomes of graduation undermine abolitionist goals, entrenching or supporting the expansion of the carceral state by bolstering funding for criminal legal systems and increasing collections, disincentivizing lawmakers from examining the scope and severity of criminal legal systems because they become reliant on those revenues, exacerbating inequalities related to the distribution of funds for social services, and disguising the need to address how current restitution mechanisms fail.
- Complementary reforms that preserve the individual benefits of graduating economic sanctions while addressing structural drawbacks include:
- Prohibiting the use of revenues from economic sanctions for the funding of criminal legal system actors and requiring lawmakers to rely on tax dollars to fund the criminal legal system
- Distributing funds in targeted community reinvestment projects and restorative responses to violations of the law