During the late 20th century, imprisonment rates in the United States saw unprecedented growth, leading correctional systems across the country to face widespread overcrowding and underfunding. Subsequently, policy makers sought out alternatives to incarceration for certain categories of offenses. Community supervision, such as probation, emerged as a popular solution to both reduce prison and jail populations as well as to generate revenue to fund the rapidly expanding legal system. With the rise in community supervision came increases in the number of people on probation for lower-level and non-violent offenses. The expansion of legal financial obligations (LFO) placed additional burdens on these persons, who disproportionately sit in lower socio-economic status brackets. Using data from the 1995 Survey of Adults on Probation (SAP), the current study adds to the literature on probation and LFOs in an important way. The SAP data contain information on the amount, frequency, and type of LFO. Thus, this paper examines the distinct types of LFOs to determine the differential burden that each type of LFO has on people on probation. This paper finds that of all types of fees, those associated with victim restitution are most likely to lead to missed payments, while those that generate revenues do not contribute significantly to missed payments. This paper discusses the implications of this for procedural justice and fairness.

Unprecedented growth in the size of the U.S. jail and prison populations during the late 20th century was accompanied by rapid increases in the size of the probation population. Probation, while intended to be an alternative to incarceration, has been described as a pathway to an incarceration stint because of its onerous conditions and other requirements. An emerging literature is examining how one of these conditions, legal financial obligations (e.g., fines, supervision fees, restitution), affect probation outcomes. However, this research is limited because data on legal financial obligations often do not detail the various types, amounts, and frequencies of payments toward LFO debt. In this paper, we tap the 1995 Survey of Adults on Probation (SAP) to study the impacts of debt burden (e.g., the amount, frequency, and type of LFO) on probationers’ capacity to make the required payments. Importantly, we find that of the seven types of LFOs included in the SAP, restitution alone was consistently shown to be the LFO associated with missing a payment across model specifications. Although the SAP data are from 1995, research indicates the use of LFOs has expanded since then. Thus, we are more likely to underestimate the impacts of the differential burden of specific LFOs on people on probation.