Two Roads to Extraction: Highways, Tax Bases, and Court Debt in Rural Oklahoma

Since the passage of legislation restricting taxation, Oklahoma has increasingly relied on the assessment and collection of fines, fees, and court costs to fund its criminal legal system. This report examines the relationship between the criminal legal system and local government finances, analyzing county-level court, jail, law enforcement, demographic, and economic data. The report also outlines the statutory and constitutional framework governing fines and fees and examines the burdens this system imposes. The authors conclude that Oklahoma’s fines and fees system functions both as a mechanism for recovering the cost of the criminal legal system and a source of county and law enforcement revenue that disproportionately burdens rural Oklahomans who can least afford it.

Read the full report here.

Key Findings: 

• Between 2022 and 2025, Oklahoma assessed over $403 million in criminal court debt and collected $81 million. During that period, rural counties faced a higher burden of assessments and collections with a per capita assessment rate of $183.94, compared to 141.40 in urban counties. 
• Oklahoma’s counties fall into 3 distinct enforcement environments based on per capita court assessments and short term traffic: Corridor Extraction counties that have both high assessments and high transient populations and substantially elevated traffic and court activity; the Localized Extraction counties that have similarly high assessment levels without high transient exposure or traffic activity; and Low Extraction counties.
  • Corridor Extraction counties have an average traffic case filing rate of approximately 7,188 per 100,000 residents and an average general court filing rate of approximately 10,059 per 100,000, compared with 6,734 traffic cases and 10,384 filings per 100,000 in Localized Extraction counties.
  • There was basically no collection difference amongst the county groups: The State average over the study period was 26 percent while Corridor Extraction counties had a collection rate of 26.5 percent and Localized Extraction counties had a collection rate of 25.7 percent.
  • Fees accounted for approximately 37 percent of sheriff budget revenue in Localized counties, compared with 26 percent in Low Extraction counties.
• The use of cost arrest warrants varies with a county’s level of rurality: The counties with the lowest populations, and the lowest tax bases, tend to issue cost arrest warrants at much higher rates than their urban counterparts. The most urban counties have an average issuance rate of 145 cost arrest warrants per 100,000.
  • The counties that utilize cost arrest warrants the most also tend to have greater opportunities to generate police contact through highway and road enforcement. 
• There is variation in the percentage of the Sheriff Office’s budget made through fees, with some counties relying on upwards of 70 percent to several with less than 10 percent.
  • Sheriff offices that tend to rely on fees as a large proportion of their budget also tend to have higher drug arrest rates.
  • The comparison of the most reliant counties with the least reliant shows significant disparities between tax base and GDP per capita.
  • Counties that rely more heavily on fee revenue also tend to have higher jail incarceration rates. Counties with the highest jail incarceration rates have, on average, poverty rates more than five percentage points higher than counties with the lowest incarceration rates.

Recommendations:

• End Driver’s License Suspensions for Failure to Pay Court Debt 
• Ban Pretextual and Non-Safety-Related Traffic Stops 
• Cap Fee Budgets for Local Government and Reroute Proceeds
• End Cost-Based Arrest Warrants