Legal Financial Obligations and Probation: Findings from the 1995 Survey of Adults on Probation

Marshall L White,William J Sabol

doi:10.3390/socsci10120450

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Mass incarceration has been at the forefront of criminal justice research and policy discussions for decades, but reforms stemming from mass incarceration have only just begun to share the spotlight in this critical space
Our final sample consists of 2030 persons, 1557 of whom were on active probation and had reported that they had been assessed fees for one or more regular payments
These findings are somewhat unsurprising considering that contemporary literature on fines and fees tends to focus on the impact of LFOS on economically marginalized populations

Summary

Introduction

Mass incarceration has been at the forefront of criminal justice research and policy discussions for decades, but reforms stemming from mass incarceration have only just begun to share the spotlight in this critical space. During the current era of reform, community supervision, such as probation or parole, emerged as one of the leading solutions to manage people convicted of lower-level offenses while avoiding the more costly incarceration term. While ostensibly an alternative to incarceration, probation populations grew along with prison populations, expanding the net of persons under the authority of correctional authorities. It was not so much that those who would have formerly served their sentences in prison or jail are serving their sentences in the community. Persons who might not have been placed on community supervision in the first place were ordered to serve sentences in the community. It is important to understand how people experience this form of correctional control and to question whether mass incarceration reforms are having their anticipated effect

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