This report is the result of a collaborative research project from 20 community-based organizations that studied the costs of incarceration on families across 14 states.
To finance its carceral system, the United States government levies taxes on the country’s most impoverished strata. Although those involved in the justice system are typically low-income individuals, they are …
In this policy brief, L.B. Eisen explains how imposing fees upon incarcerated people perpetuates mass incarceration. The brief outlines describes contemporary fee practices, explores the history of those fees, analyzes their constitutionality, and makes several policy recommendations to mitigate collateral consequences.
In this article, Professors Amaia Iratzoqui and Christi Metcalfe assess whether fines and fees affect an individual’s success in their probation program.
This research paper “examines the contributing factors which make collection of felony fines and [fees in Florida] significantly lower than collections for all other case types” and analyzes why felony collection enforcement is especially difficult.
This 2015 report provides a comprehensive overview of how California’s approach to the enforcement of fines and fees for traffic violations creates a two-tiered justice system—those who can afford to pay escape the system, while those who are too poor to pay are trapped.
After Michael Brown was shot by a member of the Ferguson Police Department, the Department of Justice’s investigation uncovered a pattern of racially discriminatory practices by the Ferguson Police Department which were primarily rooted in the city’s dependence on the criminal justice system to raise revenue. The publication of the Ferguson report is widely viewed as the start of the movement to reform fines and fees in the U.S.
This report discusses the disadvantages of the video visitation technology provided in jails and prisons, including the costs to families and how video visits are not an adequate substitute for in-person visits.
This study explains how the current lack of uniformity in funding of Alabama’s courts, even after the 1973 establishment of the Unified Judicial System (UJS), warrants a second wave of reform.