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Date: April 19, 2024 Fri
Time: 3:47 am
Time: 3:47 am
Results for fees
4 results foundAuthor: Tran-Leung, Marie Claire Title: Debt Arising From Illinois’ Criminal Justice System: Making Sense of the Ad Hoc Accumulation of Financial Obligations Summary: When a person enters the criminal justice system, a complicated, ad hoc system of financial obligations awaits. The financial obligations go by many different names: fines, fees, surcharges, assessments, restitution, just to name a few. And they are scattered through the Illinois Code, making them even more difficult to identify. Yet, when a person exits the criminal justice system, all of these financial obligations often converge to create a significant barrier to successful reentry. As the government branch responsible for collecting and disbursing these financial obligations, the Illinois judiciary has long recognized how complicated the system of financial obligations is. In describing the “plethora of user fees and surcharges,” Chief Justice Benjamin K. Miller of the Illinois Supreme Court remarked in 1991: “The complexity of the structure of various charges is such that they are not uniform and are confusing. It has been impossible for the court system to apply the charge in a consistent and coherent manner.” Little has changed in the last eighteen years. Today, the Administrative Office of Illinois Courts distributes to chief judges the Manual on Fines and Fees, a 500-page cheat sheet of all civil and criminal financial obligations authorized by Illinois statutes and the different funds they flow into. The universe of financial obligations is best classified by their purpose. Restitution, for example, compensates victims for their losses and attempts to make them whole. Fines punish the defendant for his actual conduct. Traditionally, courts calibrate restitution and fines to the particular facts of a case. By contrast, fees, the third and last type of financial obligation, tend not to be so refined. Instead, they usually aim to recover the costs incurred by the government in running the criminal justice system. When viewed in isolation, each financial obligation seems unobjectionable. They do not, however, operate in isolation. Rather, they accumulate at multiple points from the pre-trial stage to the last day of correctional supervision, creating significant debt for people who eventually exit the criminal justice system. In a study of men returning home to Chicago after being incarcerated in Illinois prisons, one out of five men reported owing money because of child support, fines, restitution, court costs, supervision fees, and other types of financial obligations. Of this group, nearly three-fourths found those debts difficult to pay down. Details: Chicago: Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, 2009. 42p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 25, 2011 at: http://www.povertylaw.org/advocacy/publications/debt-report.pdf Year: 2009 Country: United States URL: http://www.povertylaw.org/advocacy/publications/debt-report.pdf Shelf Number: 123138 Keywords: Ex-Offenders, DebtsFeesFinesOffenders, Financial ObligationsRestitution |
Author: Patel, Roopal Title: Criminal Justice Debt: A Toolkit for Action Summary: Criminal justice debt is a huge problem for the overwhelmingly indigent population of the United States criminal justice system. States charge a number of fees at every stage of criminal processing: fees for public defenders, jail fees, prison fees, court administrative fees, prosecution fees, probation fees, parole fees, etc. When these fees are applied without considering if a person can actually pay them or not, it can create enormous costs for the individuals ensnared in the criminal justice system. Many offenders now serve multiple sentences because they cannot afford to pay. They often face another physical sentence, or as they struggle to make payments, they may suffer a host of collateral consequences that create barriers to re-entering society and raise the specter of re-imprisonment. Criminal Justice Debt: A Toolkit for Action examines the myriad problems that criminal justice debt collection policies create for the individuals in the criminal justice system, the communities they reside in, and the states who attempt to make money off of them. The report also analyzes the impact these charges have had on the states that attempt to collect fees from people who cannot pay them. The authors propose areas that advocates can target for reform, and present action materials that advocates can use to build a successful campaign to fight for more just policies. Details: New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2012. 38p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 13, 2012 at: http://brennan.3cdn.net/4c14b93f5afee89bd5_zfsm6v848.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://brennan.3cdn.net/4c14b93f5afee89bd5_zfsm6v848.pdf Shelf Number: 125612 Keywords: Criminal Justice DebtFeesIndigents (U.S.)PovertyPrisoner Reentry |
Author: Resnik, Judith Title: Who Pays? Fines, Fees, Bail, and the Cost of Courts Summary: In the last decades, growing numbers of people have sought to use courts, government budgets have declined, new technologies have emerged, arrest and detention rates have risen, and arguments have been leveled that private resolutions are preferable to public adjudication. Lawsuits challenge the legality of fee structures, money bail, and the imposition of fines. States have chartered task forces to propose changes, and new research has identified the effects of the current system on low-income communities and on people of color. The costs imposed through fees, surcharges, fines, and bail affect the ability of plaintiffs and defendants to seek justice and to be treated justly. This volume, prepared for the 21st Annual Arthur Liman Center Colloquium, explores the mechanisms for financing court systems and the economic challenges faced by judiciaries and by litigants. We address how constitutional democracies can meet their obligations to make justice accessible to disputants and to make fair treatment visible to the public. Our goals are to understand the dimensions of the problems, the inter-relationships among civil, criminal, and administrative processes, and the opportunities for generating the political will to bring about reform. Details: New Haven, CT: Yale University, Law School, 2018. 222p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 8, 2018 at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3165674 Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3165674 Shelf Number: 150105 Keywords: BailCourt FeesCriminal Justice DebtDue ProcessFeesFinancial SanctionsFines |
Author: Link, Nathan Wong Title: Paid Your Debt to Society? Legal Financial Obligations and their Effects on Former Prisoners Summary: Within the last decade, scholars and practitioners alike have noted a surge in the use of legal financial obligations (LFOs) in criminal justice processing. These include fines, fees, and costs that are applied to defendants' cases from "upstream" agencies such as police departments to "downstream" agencies including jails, prisons, probation and parole agencies, and treatment centers. Legal financial obligations can be large, and the result is that outstanding balances often accumulate into unwieldy amounts of criminal justice debt. Recently, a small handful of qualitative studies have shown that these LFOs and debts can have adverse impacts on returning prisoners and their families, including increased stress, strained family relationships, worsened depression, and longer periods spent under criminal justice surveillance for those too poor to pay off outstanding balances. In addition, some of this work suggests that these financial obligations can increase the likelihood of returning to crime. This dissertation expands on the major contributions of these recent qualitative works by addressing the lack of quantitative research in this area. Toward this end, longitudinal data from the Returning Home Study (n = 740) and structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques are used to test whether LFOs and debt indeed have adverse impacts on key outcomes of interest in reentry research, including family relationships, depression, justice involvement/entanglement, and recidivism. Findings reveal partial support for past research and theory. Legal financial obligations do not appear to have impacts on depression, family conflict, and several measures of recidivism on average. However, outstanding debt owed to community supervision agencies (i.e., probation/parole/mandatory community supervision) significantly increases the likelihood of remaining under supervision, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of returning to prison. Implications for decision-making bodies from state legislatures to corrections agencies are discussed. Details: Philadelphia: Temple University, 2017. 192p. Source: Internet Resource: Dissertation: accessed June 6, 2018 at: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1952046335?pq-origsite=gscholar Year: 2017 Country: United States URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1952046335?pq-origsite=gscholar Shelf Number: 150499 Keywords: Court Fines and FeesCriminal Justice DebtFeesFinancial SanctionsFinesPrisoner Reentry |