The Ferguson Report became a watershed moment for understanding the costs and consequences of the monetary sanctions system for communities of color. Since that time, myriad reports, studies, and commissions have uncovered evidence that suggests that Ferguson, Missouri, was not an outlier but rather part of a broader set of systems throughout the country that relied on increasingly punitive assessment and collection strategies for revenue. The growth and expansion of these systems continue to have detrimental and widespread consequences. In this article, we aim to shed light on the current state of monetary sanctions as the full scope and damage of the monetary sanctions system come better into focus on the national, state, and local level. We explore the legal challenges and legislative reforms that are attempting to reshape the landscape of monetary sanctions and lessen the burden on economically disadvantaged individuals and communities of color.

Using a comparative historical analysis of legislative transcripts and primary and secondary historical documents in Illinois and Michigan, we trace the adoption of a largely understudied form of monetary sanction: pay-to-stay fees. Pay-to-stay fees are financial commitments imposed by the state on incarcerated individuals for the day-to-day cost of their incarceration. Our study identified two mutually constitutive bureaucratic motivations for the adoption of these fees—austerity as the primary rationale and deservingness as a secondary rationale. This analysis highlights an earlier conceptualization of monetary sanctions as a means of revenue generation than has previously been explored. Our findings suggest that pay-to-stay fees originated in these states from broader debates about who is ultimately fiscally responsible for the welfare state and the soaring costs of maintaining the rehabilitative ideal. During periods of fiscal crisis, state legislators have consistently looked toward this type of monetary sanction as a means to fund the correctional system.

Research has shown negative health outcomes from felony imprisonment. The conditions that create and exacerbate physical and mental health outcomes on the felony side—exposure to disease, lack of health care, and stress—are reflected in other less severe forms of criminal justice contact. Given that the low-level contact has grown along with prison incarceration, the health effects of less severe forms of criminal justice contact should be investigated. Using 10 waves from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 ([NLSY97), this project explores the impact on self-reported physical and mental health from the continuum of contact, namely, an arrest, conviction, and jail sentence. The results show that low-level forms of contact negatively affect both physical and mental health throughout the continuum of contact. The role of the type of conviction is investigated, providing a more nuanced understanding of how points of contact operate on essential outcomes such as physical and mental health.

Neoliberal governance has become a defining feature of our social world, fast-tracking the commodification of human interaction, particularly within capitalist economies. Neoliberalism's intensification of capitalist social relations shifted social institutions such as education, healthcare, and criminal justice to resemble profit-oriented enterprises. A preeminent consequence of this shift for the administration of criminal justice is the rapid expansion of monetary sanctions in the form of pay-to-stay fees. Our article contributes to scholarship on neoliberal governance and social institutions by exploring how lawmakers justify and frame the imposition and recoupment of pay-to-stay fees. We draw from a novel dataset compiled by the authors on pay-to stay in the state of Illinois, which consists of state-level pay-to-stay statutes, transcripts of legislative debates on the ratification of pay-to-stay statutes, and 102 civil complaints from 1997 to 2015 initiated on behalf of the Illinois Department of Corrections against currently and formerly incarcerated people to compel the payment of pay-to-stay fees. Our analysis suggests that in the era of neoliberal governance, consumerism is an institutional logic that lawmakers draw from to adopt pay-to-stay as a legal template in an effort to foster a producer-consumer relationship between incarcerated people and the state, thereby producing incarceration as a public commodity.

We investigate macrolevel sources of police use of fatal force at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender. Focusing on 580 U.S. counties from 2013 to 2018, we build a unique dataset and analyze whether violent crime, social disorganization, and racial conflict indicators predict police killings among six victim subgroups of Black, Hispanic, and White men and women. Regression results show that violent crime—and social disorganization, albeit less consistently—is positively associated with police killings of men, irrespective of race/ethnicity, and Hispanic women while having no significant impact on Black or White women. We find nuanced evidence that racial conflict shapes police use of fatal force across all six racial-ethnic-gender subgroups. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.