The Steep Costs of Criminal Justice Fees and Fines

November 2019

By Matthew Menendez, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Noah Atchison, and Michael Crowley

This report by the Brennan Center for Justice examines the cost of assessing and collecting criminal legal fees and fines at the county and state level in Texas, Florida, and New Mexico. The authors find that fees and fines unjustly burden people with debt just as they are re-entering society and that fees and fines are ineffective at raising revenue.

Findings:

• Fees and fines are an inefficient source of government revenue. The Texas and New Mexico counties studied here effectively spend more than 41 cents of every dollar of revenue they raise from fees and fines on in-court hearings and jail costs alone. That’s 121 times what the Internal Revenue Service spends to collect taxes and many times what the states themselves spend to collect taxes. One New Mexico county spends at least $1.17 to collect every dollar of revenue it raises through fees and fines, meaning that it loses money through this system.
• Resources devoted to collecting and enforcing fees and fines could be better spent on efforts that actually improve public safety. Collection and enforcement efforts divert police, sheriff’s deputies, and courts from their core responsibilities.
• Judges rarely hold hearings to establish defendants’ ability to pay. As a result, the burden of fees and fines falls largely on the poor, much like a regressive tax, and billions of dollars go unpaid each year. These mounting balances underscore our finding that fees and fines are an unreliable source of government revenue.
• Jailing those unable to pay fees and fines is especially costly — sometimes as much as 115 percent of the amount collected — and generates no revenue.
• The true costs are likely even higher than the estimates presented here, because many of the costs of imposing, collecting, and enforcing criminal fees and fines could not be ascertained. No one fully tracks these costs, a task complicated by the fact that they are spread across agencies and levels of government. Among the costs that often go unmeasured are those of jailing, time spent by police and sheriffs on warrant enforcement or driver’s license suspensions, and probation and parole resources devoted to fee and fine enforcement. This makes it all but impossible for policymakers and the public to evaluate these systems as sources of revenue.