What Do We Know About Community Service?
Host Matt Watkins of New Thinking interviewed Harry Glenn and James Brodick from the Center for Court Innovation (CCI) and Joanna Weiss from the Fines and Fees Justice Center about …
Public Safety
Court-Ordered Community Service: A National Perspective
Community service mandates date back to the late 1960s as an alternative to incarceration for nonviolent crimes. It has since evolved into a component of monetary sanctions or probation rather …
Court-Imposed Fines as a Feature of The Homelessness-Incarceration Nexus: A Cross-Sectional Study of the Relationship Between Legal Debt and Duration of Homelessness in Seattle, Washington, USA
Public health practitioners have long linked homelessness and criminal conviction. This is the first study of the effect of legal financial obligations (LFOs) on the duration of homelessness. In a …
Crime Survivors Speak: Texas Victims’ Experiences With Recovery and Views on Criminal Justice
In the past ten years, 41 percent of Texans have been a victim of crime. While the majority of victims describe their experience as traumatic, less than half felt supported …
It’s All About The Money: An Exploration of Probation Fees
Texas relies on supervision fees from probationers to recuperate operating costs for their probation program; failure to pay can result in additional sanctions and ultimately, revocations. This study used focus …
Criminal Justice Debt in the South: A Primer for the Southern Partnership to Reduce Debt
Criminal justice debt places a h eavy burden on low-income families, often making it harder for those who owe to earn a living, trapping them and their families in poverty. …
Changing Course: Driver’s License Suspension in Florida
This policy brief explains some of the justifications for Florida’s practice of suspending driver’s licenses and explores the consequences of that practice—driver’s license suspension disproportionately burdens low-income individuals and has …
Shelby County District Attorney declines to prosecute driving on a suspended license where underlying suspension is for unpaid fines and fees
After experimenting with this policy for about two months, Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich has permanently adopted a policy of declining to prosecute driving on a suspended license in cases where the license was suspended or revoked for nonpayment of fines and fees.
UNDER PRESSURE: How fines and fees hurt people, undermine public safety, and drive Alabama’s racial wealth divide
This report examines in detail the collateral consequences of Alabama’s court debt system and explores the ways in which it undermines public safety and drives the state’s racial wealth divide.
To Serve and Collect: The Fiscal and Racial Determinants of Law Enforcement
The authors’ completed model predicts that when a local government is experiencing a fiscal crisis, local police departments will increase arrests for “offenses that carry fines or the opportunity to forfeit assets.”