The Hidden Costs of Fines and Fees in the US Criminal Justice System: URI's Dr. Brittany Martin

This episode explores how financial penalties within the justice system disproportionately impact low-income communities, often leading to a cycle of debt and criminalization. University of Rhode Island's Dr. Brittany Martin shares insights from her research on monetary sanctions and discusses promising reforms at the state level, particularly Rhode Island's efforts to waive court fees for indigent defendants.

In this episode:

• The various forms of financial penalties beyond fines, including court fees, restitution, and probation costs
• How these sanctions are applied unevenly and tend to burden low-income individuals more heavily
• The impact of traffic violations becoming criminal offenses in certain states, contributing to ongoing financial stress
• Rhode Island's legislative reforms eliminating court costs for many defendants and the observed outcomes
• The role of assessment of ability to pay in improving collections while promoting fairness
• How research can inform legislative change and court practices around fines and fees
• The importance of justice that balances accountability with economic realities

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction to the issue of fines and fees in criminal justice

00:28 - Background: Research origins and early interests in monetary sanctions

01:14 - Types of financial penalties: Fines, fees, restitution, and jail costs

02:13 - The scope of monetary sanctions and their enforcement across states

02:59 - Public defender fees and misconceptions about free legal aid

03:29 - Restitution and incarceration costs impacting low-income individuals

04:45 - The disproportionate burden on those with lower incomes

05:07 - How monetary sanctions erode perceived justice and legitimacy

06:23 - Statistically how most defendants are indigent, with significant consequences

06:57 - Traffic violations as criminal offenses and their financial implications

07:15 - The cycle created by criminal traffic offenses and probation fees

08:20 - Policy shifts: Rhode Island’s legislation to waive court fees for indigent defendants

09:20 - The recent reforms and their early impacts in Rhode Island

11:38 - The broader movement across states to reform or eliminate municipal and court fees

12:06 - Dr. Martin’s role at the Fines and Fees Justice Center and her focus on ability-to-pay assessments

13:21 - How research can inform policies that improve efficiency and fairness in courts

14:33 - Key questions for Rhode Island political candidates about criminal justice reform and financial burdens

15:37 - Closing thoughts on the importance of justice that respects economic diversity and fairness

Transcript

Bill Bartholomew 0:00

Dr. Brittany Martin, welcome to Bartholomew Town. Before we get into today's conversation, I'll just get a read from a press release that I received from the University of Rhode Island. URI's Brittany Martin joins Fines and Fees Justice Center's at Advisory Board. For the past year, University of Rhode Island Criminology and Criminal Justice Professor Brittany Martin has been conducting in-depth research into how the financial and societal costs of legal fees weigh down some families and alternatives municipalities can implement to lessen that burden. Dr. Martin, again, thanks for your time. When did you first get interested in this aspect of really justice?

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Thanks for having me. I actually started on a project when I was a graduate student some time ago. It was one of the first multi-state studies had by Alexis Harris at the University of Washington. I was part of the Georgia team working with Dr. Sarah Shannon, my mentor in graduate school. And we were just trying to understand how people experience monetary forms of punishment, what the landscape looks like across the United States for people who are working in the system, what they understand financial penalties can look like, and how they're kind of assessing them, enforcing them, collecting them, just this broader scope because there hadn't been a ton of research on it previously. And we really wanted to see what different states were doing and kind of just going past this discussion of mass incarceration. We've been, you know, looking at this as a problem in the United States for a long time. But there are these other forms of punishment that exist as well. And so we kind of wanted to do that deep dive to see uh what was happening there. And from my grad experience, it kind of just took off that I found so much um interest in this other form of punishment, of this process that has existed in the United States for a very long time and kind of just um opening the door for Americans to see what's happening uh within the research and then also in the um everyday like American experience space.

Bill Bartholomew 2:07

Wow. And when you say, you know, the the type of financial penalties you're talking, we're talking about fines, we're talking about fees, potentially late fees on top of those penalties right there. What other sorts of financial penalties are you looking at or did you consider here?

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah, so um there's a whole host of different types of um financial um we can go punishments or even just like user fees in some um ways. So like just being involved in the court process could um give additional forms of money that a person may have to pay. So even if you're not convicted of a crime, um, you may have to pay money, let's say, multiple jurisdictions across the US. They make it that you have to pay an application fee for having a public defender. So there's a lot of um of misconception out there that public defenders are free attorneys that if you're poor, you have access to, but that's actually potentially not the case in some jurisdictions. Um, I'm thinking particularly in the work I did in Georgia, um, people have to pay a $50 application fee. Um, you cannot go in front of a judge and see if it can be waived. In some cases it happened, in others it did not. Um, and then some other types of financial penalties that can happen is potentially restitutions. So this is when an individual is convicted of a crime like theft, um, you may have to pay back the individual for the monetary value of that thing that you stole, or let's say from a store like Walmart, you would have to pay back what what you owe, it's what you took to them uh from them, excuse me. And um, some other places where money occurs is um a lot of people don't know that when you go to jail in certain jurisdictions, you actually pay for being in um the jail or prison setting. And so when you're released, you get a bill that you have to pay back to the correctional entities. There's also probation fees that exist that while you're under probation supervision, you would have to pay a monthly amount of money to whatever um organization that is supervising you, whether that be um public like we have in Rhode Island or private companies like they have in states like Georgia.

Bill Bartholomew 4:25

These are obviously just by design, they're going to because they're not prorated or based on someone's income for the most part. So these are naturally going to impact people of lower income more than of higher income. So I would assume any findings would yield that. How bad is it though? How much of a burden is this aspect of criminal justice and criminal justice reform? How much uh of a light have you shined here, so to speak, on on how many people are suffering? What would be unfairly to many of their peers?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Yeah, so I would say that um along with a lot of my amazing colleagues working on that multi-state monetary sanction study and then some of my um individual work, what we found is by and large, most people going through the system don't have means to begin with to afford the process itself. And then when we're adding on this double, triple, quadruple types of punishment when it comes financial, on top of, you know, spending time in prison or under community supervision, it just feels it kind of impacts the legitimacy of the process, right? Like at the end of the day, most people we've spoken to, they say, you know, I did something wrong. I should um have a punishment for it. But when you're adding this additional money that I do not have and there's no ability for me to make the payment, how is that justice? Um and so yeah, I think when you look at each jurisdiction, it's about between 80 and 90% of defendants going through the criminal court process are deemed indigent, which means that they're below the poverty threshold. And in the United States, for a single person, that's about $18,000 a year they're making. I don't know about you, but in Rhode Island, 18 grand's not going very far. Um so owing money on top of just not having it can be detrimental to individuals' lives in multiple levels.

Bill Bartholomew 6:25

Wow. There's also the aspect of this, which when you continue out, so to speak, traffic violations. And now these are becoming more and more of a burden for some folks. And look, the argument is there, you put a speed camera in a place like Middletown, Rhode Island, you might see a reduction in vehicles speeding through school zones. At the same time, uh there's also a no doubt a financial penalty that's being distributed equally in number in terms of the monetary amount, but certainly does not reflect a person's ability to pay that. And so for some people, a $50 fine might be whatever. And for others, that may be crippling. How much of an impact does tr do traffic violations have on this conversation?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

So traffic can have a significant impact, and even more so depending on where you live. So take um a jurisdiction or a state like Georgia, where traffic is actually a criminal offense. So what I mean by that is speeding is a criminal misdemeanor charge there. You, if you um you don't just get a ticket that you pay online, you're actually pleaning guilty to a misdemeanor when you make that payment in the state of Georgia and you have a criminal record after that. Um, and it's not just, you know, a simple $150 ticket and it's done, or the $50 you said for the speed cameras. It's essentially that you have these added fees, the user fees we were talking about before. And if you can't make those payments, they put people on probation in the state as a form of a payment plan, which adds additional money and it kind of cycles from there. Um, it can be a matter of people making, you know, payments for their kids' food or to the courts. And in the work that I have done, I have found that a lot of parents are just struggling because specifically of traffic offenses. They um owe it could be balloon up to a thousand dollars and they don't know um where to go and what to do, and if they should be making these payments to the courts to kind of alleviate that or take care of their children, take care of their housing bills, electric bills. That's something we talk about here a lot too. Like all of this adds up. And then adding this extra dynamic in certain states where it's not just, you know, a civil penalty, it's a criminal one that can be really um detrimental for people's lives. And I would bring it back to Rhode Island a little bit here. Um, we don't have traffic being criminal offenses. Um, however, if you drive on a suspended license and get um more than three stops, that ends up converting into a misdemeanor offense. And you can see some of that downstream consequences happening here for that specific type of traffic offense.

Bill Bartholomew 9:14

Is there an appetite anywhere for reform here from a legislative standpoint?

SPEAKER_01 9:20

So actually, I'm really glad you brought this up. I am in the middle of a project right now. So very tentative, not published research, um, looking at a bill that was passed in 2022 in our state legislature in Rhode Island. Both the House and Senate passed bills that uh essentially eliminated court costs. So those user fees I was talking about before. Um, we had a lot of people owing a lot of money to our court system prior to this bill being implemented, where people were owing for every charge $300 to $150 added up on top of, you know, being sentenced to probation, to jail, to being in the ACI. Um and what they did was they decided anyone sentenced to 30 days or more would automatically have this cost remitted. They wouldn't have to pay it. Um, and then if a defendant was deemed indigent, whether by having a public defender or filling out a financial affidavit in the court process, um, they would be able to have that money waived. So um I am looking into the implications now for what we're seeing on the ground in the court process across all of the courts in Rhode Island. I have amazing undergraduate students here at URI who are working for me. They're in the courts as we speak, um, watching and observing, seeing what's going on. We're talking to um different people working in the court system, people who have owed money previously and who do not anymore to see what the implications are. Um and uh what the data is showing is that the amount of people who have had it waived has almost doubled over the time since the bill was implemented. So I think Rhode Island is one of the states that is kind of a pioneer in this. You know, most states are not getting rid of this large-scale fee or or um cost that exists. We're seeing movement across multiple states, but not to this degree. And so to be able to be on the ground here and do the work to look at those implications, my hope is to be able to show other states, you know, Rhode Island's done this, and maybe you all should be doing the same.

Bill Bartholomew 11:33

Very, very interesting. Um, you were recently, it's part of this release today, you were uh this release that we're discussing today, you were named to a two-year term on the fines and fees justice center. That's a national advocacy and research organization dedicated to eliminating fees and reforming fines within the criminal legal system that was founded back in 2018. Uh what's the scope of your work look like there and and what do you hope to accomplish in this uh two-year term?

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah, so um for the Finds and Fees Justice Center, I've been um working with them on uh some of their assessment of ability to pay practicing. And so they do a lot of work with jurisdictions across the United States to see like how can we assess whether people can make payments before we are telling them this is how much money you owe to the courts. Um, because what we found is when in the in the research that we're doing, most states, most smaller jurisdictions, they're collecting maybe not even 10% of what people are owed. And so one of the um best indicators for people to actually be able to make payments is if you are assessing whether they have the funds to do so. Um and so I started off working with the Fine Sophie's Justice Center on that smaller um kind of informal basis, and it's turned into this advisory board position. Um, my hope is to continue um bringing the scholarship that I'm doing. I do a lot of mixed methods research. So um a lot, I love the statistics to talk to, you know, these are the the prevalencies, the large scale impact when we're looking quantitatively, but also to be able to bring people's experiences and what's happening on the ground within the courts, whether it's people who are actually, you know, enforcing and collecting money, like making a system that is more efficient for the court process, because we know the court system's inundated with cases right now and it can't handle the amount. So um, my hope is just to continue doing the work I'm doing and to just talk about the potential policy avenues we have to bring science into that conversation.

Bill Bartholomew 13:45

And one last question. We have an attorney general's race here in Rhode Island. Four Democratic candidates will be um seeking that nomination, likely will go on to become the next attorney general. One of them, Keith Hoffman, endorsed by Attorney General Nerona, he comes out of Nerona's office. Another one, Kim A'Hearn, recently cannabis control commissioner, uh Joe Solomon Jr. and Jason Knight, both members of the legislature. Okay, so from your standpoint, if you had one question for each of these candidates uh and their understanding of criminal justice reform through the lens of fines and fees in your research, and you could ask them one question, or if I could ask them one question in a debate scenario, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 14:28

That's a good question. And it's very heavy. Um, so around fines and fees and Rhode Island, my question would be how can we develop a system where we are bringing justice for victims of crime? We are keeping an efficient system, but we are also not perpetrating this um system built off of um having poor people have to pay money for things when they just don't have the money to do so. So, really, it how do we have justice um and just keep with keep with the true nature of what the system is intended for all people involved?

Bill Bartholomew 15:11

Yeah. Great question. And we'll that they will hopefully hear this and respond. If not, we'll certainly ask them because I think this is a critical area to focus in on here in our own community, given that you are at our flagship university, the University of Rhode Island, doing this research. And uh we appreciate your time today. Dr. Brittany Martin, URI, and we'll uh keep in touch on this as you have developments.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Thank you so much for having me.