No abstract

Research investigating monetary sanctionsthe fines, fees, restitution, costs, and surcharges that court systems impose-has revealed the ways these legal financial obligations (LFOs) create precarious conditions for the justice-involved (Harris 2016; Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Edelman 2017). Within a burgeoning literature examining how LFOs shape the lives of those who incur these debts, researchers highlight racial and ethnic diferences in amounts imposed (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2011), sanctions for nonpayment (Bannon, On Thin Ice: Bureaucratic Processes of Monetary Sanctions and Job Insecurity mIchele ca dIga n a nd ga br Iel a k Ir k Research on court-imposed monetary sanctions has not yet fully examined the impact that processes used to manage court debt have on individuals' lives. Drawing from both interviews and ethnographic data in Illinois and Washington State, we examine how the court's management of justice-related debt affect labor market experiences. We conceptualize these managerial practices as procedural pressure points or mechanisms embedded within these processes that strain individuals' ability to access and maintain stable employment. We find that, as a result, courts undermine their own goal of recouping costs and trap individuals in a cycle of court surveillance.

Using a comparative historical analysis of legislative transcripts and primary and secondary historical documents in Illinois and Michigan, we trace the adoption of a largely understudied form of monetary sanction: pay-to-stay fees.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.

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.

K a r in D. M a rtin , K iMber ly Spencer-Sua r ez, a nD Ga br iel a K ir K This article proposes the centrality of procedural integrity-or fidelity to local norms of case processing-to the post-sentencing adjudication of monetary sanctions. We draw on insights gained from observations of more than 4,200 criminal cases in sixteen courts in New York and Illinois and find that procedural integrity becomes a focal point in the absence of monetary sanctions paid in full and on time. This examination of the interplay between the sociolegal context and workgroups within courtrooms brings to light how case processing pressure, mandatory monetary sanctions, defendants with pronounced financial insecurity, and judicial discretion inform the role monetary sanctions play in court operations.