Our government wields tremendous power, including the power to punish criminals. Scholars and judges have debated the purpose of this power for centuries, settling on four fundamental uses for the power to punish: incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
When the government uses its power to punish responsibly, it promotes public safety, justice, and social order by taking criminals off the streets and healing the harm done by crime.
But in hundreds of counties, towns, and cities across America, our criminal justice system has taken on a different function. Today, state and local governments use their power to punish to raise revenue by imposing steep fines and fees on even the slightest infraction of the law. Nearly 600 towns derive 10% or more of their municipal budgets from court-imposed fees and fines. In 2018, Georgetown, Louisiana, collected nearly $500,000 in fines and fees, amounting to a whopping 92% of the town’s revenue.
It isn’t illegitimate for a convicted offender to bear some of the costs associated with their own punishment in the criminal justice system. But when local governments are dependent upon court-imposed fines and fees to balance the budget, we have a big problem. And it’s a problem nobody seems interested in fixing except conservatives and libertarians.
The big issue here is that local governments using our criminal justice system to raise revenue creates a clear conflict of interest.
Conservatives and libertarians often worry that a conflict of interest has developed in our criminal justice government institutions. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the federal government from imposing “excessive fines,” a prohibition that the Supreme Court incorporated against the states in a February 2019 decision. Cities, counties, and towns don’t have that same restriction.
That doesn’t mean all of the fines and fees imposed by local governments are excessive; it means there is very little oversight for whether they are or aren’t. And the result is a criminal justice system that, over the years, has ballooned into a massive revenue-enhancing industry of debt and debt collection.
These debts disproportionately affect the poor and minorities. What’s more, there’s very little evidence that court-imposed fines and fees are that effective at raising revenue anyway. Billions go unpaid every year because people are too poor, and the debt rises too quickly for them to make restitution.
At the same time, local governments have to expend significant resources just to administer this system of fines and fees. Law enforcement officers must serve warrants for failures to pay fees and fines, and administrators must process payments and issue notices. It’s hard to determine just how inefficient this system is, but one study found that some counties in Texas and New Mexico were paying 41 cents in administrative costs for every dollar of fees and fines they collected.
Luckily, some politicians at the state level are taking action. Between February and April 2021, Florida, Indiana, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon all considered legislation that would eliminate fines, fees, and court costs for juveniles in the criminal justice system. And in June 2021, Nevada enacted a law to end the practice of suspending an individual’s driver’s license or prohibiting an individual from applying for a driver’s license because of an unpaid fine or fee.
These are small steps, but they’re steps in the right direction. When we talk about criminal justice reform, all too often we focus just on the incarcerated population. But we need to be aware of all the ways our criminal justice system is needlessly hurting people across the country in small towns, cities, and villages, too.
Our criminal justice system exists to pursue justice, not to generate revenue. We can’t afford to let court-imposed fines and fees continue to spiral out of control.
Timothy Head is executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
