Racial Disparities Archives - Page 10 of 18 - Fines and Fees Justice Center

Flattened: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Knocked Financially Insecure Alabamians on their Backs and Widened the Racial Prosperity Gap

Between May and September 2020, Alabamaba Applesseed and partners surveyed 389 financially insecure Alabamaians. The authors documented how daily lives and financial circumstances changed for respondents since March 13, 2020, …

The Price of Justice: Fines, Fees and the Criminalization of Poverty in the United States

Mass incarceration and the rising cost of the justice system correlate with the high number and value of fines and fees imposed throughout the justice system. As federal funding for …

Community Success Initiative, et al. v. Moore, et al.

In North Carolina, roughly 70,000 individuals are prohibited from voting because they have a prior felony conviction, and in many cases individuals are disenfranchised solely because of their inability to …

Who Does America Want?

This paper details the fines and fees imposed on people for traffic offenses in Connecticut, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, and immigration-related fees imposed on people seeking citizenship in the US.

Price of Justice- Challenging the Future of Fines and Fees

This report summarizes the progress five states made in fines and fees reform, the challenges they experienced, and guidance for other jurisdictions interested in reforming their court systems.

Pocketbook Policing: How race shapes municipal reliance on punitive fines and fees in the Chicago suburbs

Using data from Chicagoland's suburbs, the authors explain why Black suburban municipalities are driven to rely on fines and fees to address budget shortfalls unlike officials of suburbs with different racial make-ups.

Cited for Being in Plain Sight: How California Policies Being Black, Brown, and Unhoused in Public

This report is a detailed analysis of non-traffic infraction data from California which shows that minorities are cited at higher rates than White people.

New York’s Ferguson Problem- How the state’s racist fee system punishes poverty, lacks transparency, and is overdue for reform

This paper shows how New York’s criminal justice fines and fees practices worsen racial disparities and punish low-income people.

UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review

The UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review (CJLR) has partnered with the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School to publish works from the Progressing Reform of Fees and Fines …

Debt, Incarceration, and Re-Entry: A Scoping Review

Justice-involved people and their families are heavily burdened by debt: legal financial obligations (LFO) from criminal justice involvement, pre-existing debt that compounded during incarceration, and debts accrued during reentry. This …