Abstract
Although men’s incarceration rates have declined in the United States, women’s have stayed steady and even risen in some areas. At the same time, courts have increased their use of monetary sanctions, especially for low-level offenses. We propose that women’s incarceration trends can be partially explained by county dependence on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue. We suggest that monetary sanctions expose female defendants to processes that increase their likelihood of incarceration, especially in counties more reliant on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue, and where women’s poverty rates are high. Using data from Washington State, we find county dependence on monetary sanctions is positively associated with rates of women sentenced to incarceration. Although rural counties’ rates are higher, they depend on monetary sanctions no more than nonrural counties do.
- © 2022 Russell Sage Foundation. O’Neill, Kate K., Tyler Smith, and Ian Kennedy. 2022. “County Dependence on Monetary Sanctions: Implications for Women’s Incarceration.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 157–72. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.2.08. We would like to thank Arnold Ventures for providing funding for this project (PI: Alexes Harris) and the Multi-State Monetary Sanctions Study team and Research Assistants who contributed to the data collection processes. Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant, P2C HD042828, to the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington. Direct correspondence to: Kate K. O’Neill, at oneillkk{at}uw.edu, 211 Savery Hall, Box 353340, Seattle, WA 98195-340, 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.