A person convicted of a minor offense might owe a few hundred dollars in court fines. Manageable, perhaps—until you add supervision fees, surcharges for court facilities, fees for public defenders, drug testing costs, and electronic monitoring charges. Suddenly that minor offense carries a price tag of several thousand dollars.

For people leaving the criminal justice system—often with disrupted employment, limited education, and the stigma of a record—these financial obligations become impossible burdens. And the system's response to nonpayment doesn't involve flexibility or understanding. It involves more fees, license suspensions, warrants, and eventually, jail.

This creates what researchers call a poverty trap: a self-reinforcing cycle where the consequences of being poor make it harder to stop being poor. The justice system, ostensibly designed to resolve criminal matters and facilitate reintegration, instead becomes an engine that extracts wealth from those who have none and punishes them for having nothing to give.

The architecture of criminal justice finance has grown remarkably complex over the past four decades. What began as straightforward court fines has metastasized into an elaborate system of fees, surcharges, and assessments that few defendants fully understand when they plead guilty.

Consider a typical felony case. The base fine might be $500. But add a state penalty assessment (often 100% of the fine), a county assessment, a court facilities fee, a conviction assessment, and various other mandatory surcharges, and that $500 becomes $2,000 or more. Then come the operational fees: supervision costs for probation or parole, drug testing fees charged per test, electronic monitoring rental, treatment program costs, and administrative fees for setting up payment plans.

Research by the Brennan Center found that defendants in some jurisdictions face over forty distinct fees and surcharges. Many of these were introduced during budget crises as legislatures sought to shift court operating costs onto defendants rather than general tax revenues. The result is a funding model that depends on extracting money from the people least able to pay.

The accumulation problem compounds through interest and collection fees. Many jurisdictions charge interest on unpaid balances—sometimes at rates comparable to payday loans. When accounts are referred to collections, additional fees are added. A $1,000 obligation can easily double or triple over time, even if the person makes partial payments. The debt doesn't shrink; it grows.

Takeaway

Court financial obligations function less like proportional punishment and more like compound interest on poverty—small debts become impossible ones through mechanisms designed to generate revenue rather than justice.

Inability to pay triggers a predictable sequence of escalating consequences that push people deeper into the justice system rather than facilitating their exit from it. The most common first consequence is driver's license suspension.

Approximately 44 states suspend or revoke driver's licenses for unpaid court debt. In most of America, losing a license means losing access to employment. You can't drive to work, can't drive to interviews, can't transport children to school. Studies consistently show that over 40% of people with suspended licenses continue driving because they have no alternative—which creates new criminal exposure and new fines.

When payment falls behind, additional fees are assessed. Many jurisdictions charge late fees, payment plan fees, and collection fees. Warrants may be issued for failure to appear at payment hearings. These warrants create constant risk—a routine traffic stop becomes an arrest. Once arrested, people often lose jobs, housing, and custody arrangements while they sit in jail awaiting hearings.

The ultimate consequence is incarceration itself. While the Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that courts cannot jail people who genuinely cannot pay, implementation of this principle varies wildly. Many courts lack adequate ability-to-pay inquiry procedures. Some treat any work or housing as evidence of ability to pay. The ACLU has documented widespread patterns of jailing people for debts they simply cannot pay—a practice functionally equivalent to modern debtors' prisons.

Takeaway

License suspension for court debt is perhaps the purest example of a poverty trap mechanism—it simultaneously removes the means to earn money and creates new criminal exposure that generates more debt.

Several jurisdictions have begun experimenting with alternative approaches that decouple justice system funding from extraction of resources from defendants. The evidence on these reforms offers both encouragement and complication.

Day fines, used extensively in European countries, scale financial penalties to the offender's daily income. A wealthy person and a poor person convicted of the same offense pay different amounts, but each experiences comparable economic impact. Studies from Finland and Sweden show that day fines achieve similar or better compliance rates than flat fines while dramatically reducing the disparate burden on low-income defendants.

Ability-to-pay assessments before imposing financial obligations represent a simpler reform. San Francisco's Financial Justice Project implemented systematic ability-to-pay hearings and found that adjusting obligations to actual capacity significantly increased compliance rates. When people owe what they can realistically pay, they pay it. When they owe impossible amounts, they give up.

Some jurisdictions have gone further by eliminating categories of fees entirely. California abolished criminal administrative fees in 2020 and cleared $16.5 billion in outstanding debt. The fiscal impact has been smaller than projected—much of that debt was uncollectable anyway. Meanwhile, people previously trapped in debt cycles have been freed to focus on employment and stability. The emerging evidence suggests that fee elimination can be both more humane and more honest about what revenue these fees actually generate.

Takeaway

Reforms that align financial obligations with actual ability to pay tend to improve compliance—people can engage with reasonable expectations but disengage entirely from impossible ones.

The criminal justice system's dependence on fines and fees represents a fundamental confusion about its purpose. If the goal is punishment, flat fines punish poor people vastly more than wealthy ones. If the goal is revenue generation, the uncollectable debt and incarceration costs make it fiscally irrational.

What we've built is a system that transforms minor legal infractions into lifelong economic burdens, that traps people in cycles of debt and incarceration, and that extracts what little resources poor communities have while generating surprisingly little actual revenue.

Reform isn't just about mercy or even fairness—it's about designing financial obligations that can actually be fulfilled, that don't create more problems than they solve, and that allow the justice system to do what it's supposed to do: resolve matters and facilitate reintegration.