Procedural justice research has shown how people’s experiences with courtroom actors, such as judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, shape their views of the justice system and its legitimacy. However, less is known about how people’s experiences outside the courtroom that relate to their cases shape their views of this system. Based on forty-one interviews with twenty-one youths and twenty parents in Dane County, Wisconsin about their legal financial obligations (also known as monetary sanctions), this study broadens the focus of procedural justice to include another key aspect to people’s experiences with the law beyond the courtroom: their experiences navigating bureaucratic aspects to their youths’ cases and their interactions with non-court staff (e.g., clerks, Human Services, and community agencies), otherwise known as “auxiliary personnel” (Feeley 1979) or “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010/1980). We focus on legal financial obligations as a case study to show this multi-agency view of procedural justice as it reveals the families’ often disjointed experiences with justice staff both inside and outside of the courtroom.

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Scholarship at the intersection of punishment and welfare has revealed how the penal and welfare systems in the United States are increasingly intertwined. However, there has been little empirical investigation into how this entangling of coercion and support shapes the decisions of the people working within the criminal legal system. This article examines how prosecutors, actors with enormous discretion, consider the supportive services within the criminal legal system in their decision-making. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of two midwestern District Attorney’s offices, I find that prosecutor decisions about whether to charge an individual with a crime or offer a probation recommendation are often based on the belief that the accused needs supportive services, a phenomenon I call prosecution for services. These prosecutors either think of the criminal legal system as one of the only avenues for people to receive these services or believe a defendant must be coerced into using them. This study reveals the on-the-ground consequences of a retrenchment of the welfare state and expansion of the penal state, where access to social support for the poor becomes contingent on criminal justice involvement.