Abstract
Low-level misdemeanor and traffic violations draw tens of millions of people into local courts to pay fines and fees each year, generating billions of dollars in revenue. We examine how standardized legal fines and fees for low-level charges induce disparate treatment and result in disparate impact. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates administrative court records as well as interviews with criminal defendants from Texas, we find that although the majority of defendants readily pay for and conclude their case, African American, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged defendants spend disproportionate amounts of money and time resolving theirs. Analysis of criminal case records illustrates the disparate impact of monetary sanctions through the accrual of debt and time spent resolving a charge. Interviews reveal irreconcilable tensions between American ideals of equality in sentencing and the meaning and value of money and time in an increasingly unequal society.
- © 2022 Russell Sage Foundation. Bing, Lindsay, Becky Pettit, and Ilya Slavinski. 2022. “Incomparable Punishments: How Economic Inequality Contributes to the Disparate Impact of Legal Fines and Fees.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 118–136. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.2.06. This research was funded by a grant to the University of Washington from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (Alexes Harris, PI). We thank the faculty and graduate student collaborators of the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions for their intellectual contributions to the project. We would also like to thank Riad Azar and Taylor Needham for excellent research assistance and members of the Crime, Law, and Deviance workshop at the University of Texas at Austin for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was also supported by grant, P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Direct correspondence to: Lindsay Bing, at lbing{at}utexas.edu, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, United States; Becky Pettit, at bpettit{at}utexas.edu, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, United States; and Ilya Slavinski, at ilyaslav{at}buffalo.edu, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.