< PreviousRemoteCOM Robert Rosenbusch, President/CEO 4955 Technology Way 2251 Double Creek Dr # 404 Round Rock, TX 78664 robert@remote-com.com SCRAM Systems Erin White, Events Marketing Manager 1241 West Mineral Avenue, Ste 100 Littleton, CO 80120 ewhite@scramsystems.com Shadowtrack Robert L. Magaletta, President & CEO PO Box 1686 Covington, LA 70434-1686 robert@shadowtrack.com Smart Start, Inc. Annette Beard, National Sales Manager 500 E Dallas Rd Ste 100 Grapevine, TX 76051-7658 abeard@smartstartinc.com SolusGuard Michael Klein, Director of Sales & Marketing 201-15 Innovation Blvd. Saskatoon, SK S7N 2X8, Canada SuperCom, Inc. David DeGeorge, Regional Sales Manager 200 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003 The Change Companies Jesse Tillotson, National Director of Justice Services The Change Companies 5221 Sigstrom Dr, Carson City, NV 89706 jtillotson@changecompanies.net Track Group Miranda Follis, Director of Marketing 200 East 5th AvenueSuite 100 Napierville, IL 60563 miranda.follis@trackgrp.com Tyler Technologies Lara Lung, Trade Show Specialist 5101 Tennyson Parkway Plano, TX 75024 Lara.Lung@tylertech.com 806-791-8200 corporate members cont’d VOLUME 49, NUMBER 1Exceeding Standards with Reliability and Accuracy LifeSafer partners with monitoring authorities nationwide to provide supervision to those requiring an ignition interlock device. Learn more about the benefits of LifeSafer’s comprehensive alcohol testing and reporting solutions: •Expansive network of top-rated, certified installers across the country •Only IID provider with a “No-Call Install” 5-minute online enrollment •Local account manager for ongoing support and education •Dedicated collateral to walk your clients through the process • Caseload assistance for scheduling in-person training, notifications, and alerts •Access to an industry leading monitoring and analytics dashboard -BrAC data log interpretation -Camera photos and real time reporting lifesafer.com Contact us to get started with LifeSafer today! 800-816-7057CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION1975-2025 A M E R I C A N P R O B A T I O N A ND P A R O L E A S S O C I A T I O N S E R V IN G C OM M U N I T Y S U P E R V I S I O N F O R F IFTYY E A R S15 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION FINES AND FEES IN COMMUNITY SUPERVISION: BARRIERS TO SUCCESSFUL REINTEGRATION by Meghan Koza, M.A. & Dragana Derlic, Ph.D. I t was the late 1980s that gave rise to the use of fines and fees within community supervision1 (Foster, 2020), and by 2010 fines and fees had increased in number and amount in most states (Foster, 2020; Sobol, 2016). Although both originate in the criminal legal system and require individuals on community supervision to make payments, fines and fees have different rationales. Fines are a form of punishment, whereas fees are based on the costs of placing an individual on community supervision (Foster, 2020). Regardless of the difference, both put financial burdens on supervised individuals. For example, the inability to pay assessed fines and fees can result in future criminal legal consequences such as extended supervision periods, additional costs, and in some cases even re-incarceration (Link, Powell, et al., 2020; Bannon et al., 2010; Harris et al., 2010; Foster, 2020). Because these financial obligations can have a significant impact on individuals and their lives, particularly those with limited resources, there is a growing concern about the fairness of such penalties and their potential to hinder successful reintegration. UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY SUPERVISION To begin, community supervision is a form of legal oversight that allows individuals to reside in the community while serving their sentence as opposed to being incarcerated in a correctional facility (probation) or after serving a minimum amount of time in prison (parole) (Phelps & Curry, 2017). The goal of community supervision is to facilitate the reintegration process of returning citizens while making sure that they comply with rules and regulations set forth by their jurisdiction (Link, Powell, et al., 2020; Phelps & Curry, 2017). Community supervision is constantly evolving and becoming more pervasive (Thompson et al., 2024). Throughout the 20th century, for example, community supervision was focused much more on rehabilitation than oversight and punishment (Phelps & Curry, 2017). However, with the growing concern over ineffective rehabilitation practices and the lingering effect of Martinson’s “Nothing Works” report (1974), coupled with concerns of racial disparities, the goals of community supervision started to change. By the 1980s the goal of supervision had shifted from fulfilling the role of a social worker to more punitive objectives such as monetary sanctions (Ruhland et al., 2020). Those on community supervision face other problematic consequences, such as restrictions on public housing and social services as well as, importantly, employment barriers and, possibly, voting rights (Phelps & Curry, 2017), and these may affect or be affected by the financial challenges posed by fines and fees as well. Examining data on the number of individuals on community supervision and incarcerated—and the reason for the incarceration—is useful for understanding the impact of increases in fines and fees. The number of adults on supervision around the 1980s peaked at one million, and by 2007 that number had increased to a staggering 5.1 million–double that of the number of people incarcerated in local, state, and federal facilities (Phelps & Curry, 2017). Mass incarceration peaked around 2009 (The Sentencing Project, 2024), in part attributable to the rise in the use of fines and fees, as a portion of those incarcerated were those who had violated their terms of probation and parole by failing to make required payments and were now being jailed or sent back to prison on that basis (Saunders, 2024). As of 2021, the number of people on community supervision, particularly those on probation and parole, was estimated to be around 3.7 million (Wang, 2023). Though that number has decreased, it is important to note that 44% of prison admissions that year were people who had violated their terms of probation or parole (Saunders, 2024). This should not come as a surprise, as research continues to show that fines and fees have increased in number and amount at the local, state, and federal levels (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Bannon et al., 2010; Greenberg et al., 2016; Harris, 2016; Martin et al., 2018) to the point where modern community supervision has arguably become more of a monitoring system than a support system. Moreover, individuals are often sentenced to even longer periods of supervision and are becoming more involved 16 PERSPECTIVES with the criminal legal system than ever before (Foster, 2020). Although rehabilitation and support for reintegration are included within the realm of community supervision, punishment, which includes imposing monetary obligations on those under supervision, tends to be an integral component (Phelps & Curry, 2017). FINES AND FEES OVERVIEW Important questions must be asked: What is the purpose of fines and fees, who benefits and suffers from them, and what should be done? Before taking up the last question, it is critical to obtain answers to the first two, carefully exploring both purpose and impact. To some extent, the purpose of such monetary assessments and the issue of who benefits from them overlap. As indicated above, fines and fees serve as a financial penalty or a consequence for an individual’s involvement in criminal behavior. In some cases, they are applied as restitution for victims of crime and are used to replenish the institutions of the criminal legal system for services being provided. They also serve as a form of accountability and an alternative to incarceration (Martin et al., 2022; Dozier & Kiel, 2021; Slavinski & Pettit, 2022). Fines and fees have been characterized as a rehabilitative approach because they allow the individual to stay within the community as opposed to being incarcerated and being exposed to negative consequences of incarceration (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Gordon & Glaser, 1991; Hillsman, 1990; Ruback, 2011). Between the two forms of monetary sanctions, most of the costs paid by individuals on community supervision are fees (i.e., program fees and electronic monitoring fees) rather than fines (i.e., penalties as part of a sentence). The amount of these fees varies across the country and is based on the intensity of the individual’s supervision and the specific jurisdiction (Ruhland et al., 2020), with fines and fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars (Foster, 2020). Fees are used for supervision purposes to offset the costs of probation and parole programs, in other words, they contribute to the funding of officers and administrators who monitor the returning citizen (Sobol, 2016). Fees for mandatory programs (i.e., drug testing) help cover the maintenance and expenses of providing such services to returning citizens. Lastly, returning citizens are assessed fees for participating in rehabilitative programs to help foster a sense of investment in their own rehabilitation and reintegration (Sobol, 2016). The shrinking budgets of state and local governments have led to a further increase in the use of fines and fees. This has been done by shifting operational costs to the criminal legal system and its users–further generating money for the criminal legal system from low-income individuals (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Atkinson, 2016; Beckett & Harris, 2011; Edwards, 2020; Pacewicz & Robinson, 2021). In fact, several state and local legislators use the criminal legal system to fund a variety of different government services that do not have anything to do with the criminal legal system (Foster, 2020; Sobol, 2016). In the state of New Jersey, for example, those who received a traffic ticket were assessed a fee to fund autism research (Foster, 2020). Likewise, California assessed a charge of $310 on a red-light violation, with the money used to fund several different programs, including the Traumatic Brain Injury Fund (Foster, 2020). Moreover, Texas has used supervision fees to fund 30% of its probation department’s budget, and states like New Jersey, New York, and California use the money received from monetary sanctions to fund various state programs that may or may not have anything to do with the criminal legal system (Bannon et al., 2010; Foster, 2020; King et al., 2022; Ruhland, 2021; Ruhland et al., 2020). In a recent review by Thompson and colleagues (2024), they find that the usage of fines and fees in Ferguson, Missouri, resulted in “23% of the city’s revenue in 2013” being generated by “legal-financial obligations” (p.5). These examples demonstrate how the state and criminal legal system take advantage of people by extracting millions of dollars from them, assessing such fines on people who are overwhelmingly poor (Sobol, 2016) and disproportionately of color (Foster, 2020). Although it is well documented that cities consider the revenue they receive from fines and fees when creating their various budgets, including budgets unrelated to criminal justice expenses, this information is generally not in the forefront of public awareness, especially the issue of those who are being fined for further profit. IMPACT OF FINES AND FEES Taken together, it is evident that agencies within the criminal legal system envision that fines and fees will offset the costs of running successful community supervision programs, but, ironically, the desired successful outcomes for those under supervision become more difficult to achieve when they need to cover excessive payment demands despite already dealing with VOLUME 49, NUMBER 1In Use 20 Not In Use 65 Total Phones Active 85 Locations Received 102 Completed 14 Average Time 2h 23m 17s ShadowAlertness Dashboard Institutions On Overnight Hospital Stays LoginReminderLevel 1Level 2Level 3 0 5 10 15 20 Breakdown by Color Stage 05101520 Stonegate Blackwater Clearwater Transforming Corrections with Advanced Intelligence Discover solutions for unmatched safety and efficiency. Explore Our Solutions Providing Solutions to Corrections For Over 25 Years CHECK-IN AVAILABLE18 PERSPECTIVES insufficient financial resources. Prior research has shown that fees and restitution hinder the chance of successful reintegration for those who cannot afford them (Bannon et al., 2010). Trying to paying off debt from fines and fees can become a significant or overwhelming struggle. Moreover, failure to pay the initially assessed fines or fees may result in assessment of additional and even more burdensome charges (Thompson et al., 2024). In instances when the amount owed only increases over time, chances of successful reintegration are affected, leading these individuals back to jail or to a parole revocation (Bannon et al., 2010). FINANCIAL BURDEN OF FINES AND FEES Supervision fees may cost an individual on probation anywhere from $10 to $65 a month, which on its own may not appear to be restrictive but in combination with other costs may become too challenging to tackle (Ruhland, 2021). Individuals who are placed on electronic monitoring devices may pay anywhere between just under a dollar to $40 a day, on top of an installation fee ranging between $25 to $250 (Fines & Fees Justice Center, 2022). Many individuals on community supervision are low income and struggle to pay the assessed amounts (Thompson et al., 2024). This problem is exacerbated, in part, due to the fact that judges do not necessarily take into consideration an individual’s financial situation before imposing fines and fees (Sobol, 2016). Moreover, for those who are wealthy and have the means to pay, bypassing the court is relatively easier (Thompson et al., 2024, p.5; see also Kirk et al., 2022 and Bing et al., 2022). The problem is most significant for those who struggle to pay for even the “small[est]” of fines or fees, and they are greatly impacted in the long run (Thompson et al., 2024, p.5; see also Link, 2019; Shannon et al., 2020). Unfortunately, collateral consequences of fines and fees are rarely ever considered. FACTORS AFFECTING ABILITY TO PAY The strain caused by monetary sanctions is worsened by specific economic challenges for individuals on community supervision. Access to employment is often complicated by having a criminal record—especially a felony record— and being under supervision, as employers may believe that such individuals will recidivate, making them risky to hire (Thompson et al., 2024; Holzer, 2022; see also Cadigan & Kirk, 2020). Even beyond recidivism risk, the terms of supervision complicate one’s ability to hold stable employment. Having to miss work for court appearances, meetings with supervision officers, random drug checks, or other required obligations tend to make these individuals less reliable employees and thus less attractive hires (Capece, 2022). More generally, barriers beyond supervision itself complicate access to employment. Individuals on community supervision may have low levels of education and limited formal work experience, making them generally less appealing to employers (Holzer, 2022). Prior research has shown that involvement with the criminal legal system also leads to health issues (Harris et al., 2010), and having additional debt can often contribute to stress, mental health issues, and negative family relationships (Link, Hyatt, & Ruhland, 2020). The majority of those who are convicted of a crime are parents of young children, with consequent costs—and for those who are obligated to pay child support the fines and fees can be particularly burdensome, taking away from funds needed to provide for their children. A failure to make all or part of child support payments can lead to a significant reduction in the overall family income in the households where the children live and hence affect the well-being of the children (Harris et al., 2010). Alongside the struggle of locating employment faced by individuals on community supervision, many also have other financial obligations that intensify the burden caused by the sanctions. Individuals with household debt and limited housing opportunities (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Bing et al., 2022), as well as those with children, must manage other expenses, such as a mortgage, car payment, and child-related costs, which when coupled with monetary sanctions, can place a substantial strain on limited finances (Bannon et al., 2010). If an individual is already struggling financially, the imposition of monetary sanctions will greatly decrease the quality of life for these individuals by making it difficult to afford necessities such as food, rent, or medical care, not to mention the difficulty of accumulating savings (Harris et al., 2010; Link, Hyatt, et al., 2020; Ruhland, 2021; Shapiro, 2014). Factoring in the burden of fees and fines on top of these other factors may make individuals on community supervision reach the tipping point in regard to their ability to successfully reintegrate into their community, maintain employment, and avoid recidivism in the long run (Foster, 2020). In sum, the way fines and fees so often work to keep individuals in a constant state of poverty makes them qualify as a “coercive debt collection” program or, in essence, serving to create a system of “layaway freedom” (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Pattillo and Kirk 2021). VOLUME 49, NUMBER 119 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION RACIAL DISPARITIES Fines and fees in community corrections are also furthering racial disparities in the criminal legal system (Sobol, 2016). People of color who are on community supervision are more likely to live in low-income communities with few to no resources (Thompson et al., 2024; see also Harris 2016). They are also more likely to have a condition of wearing electronic monitoring devices (Fines & Fees Justice Center, 2022), meaning that they may be required to pay a daily fee for usage of these devices—a cost that is difficult to afford when making low wages, especially when accompanied by other monetary sanctions (Fines & Fees Justice Center, 2022). In addition, prior research has found that people of color are statistically more likely to receive a contempt hearing notification for nonpayment of their monetary sanctions and to have a capias warrant2 issued against them than their white counterparts (Link, Powell, et al., 2020; Sobol, 2016). This unequal potential for legal consequences, combined with the fact that individuals on probation are more likely to be men of color with an annual income of $20,000 or less, means that the economic hardships exacerbated by community supervision are only intensified by the usage of fines and fees as a condition of supervision (Phelps, 2020). It is worth considering the racial gaps presented in the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2015 “Ferguson Report,” reviewed by Thompson and colleagues (2024), which indicates that 23% of the city of Ferguson’s revenue was derived primarily from ticketing people of color (90% Black) despite them only making up two-thirds of the city’s population (p.5). Although several changes have been made since that report was published, including laws enacted under Missouri’s Senate Bill 5 from 2015 that addressed the percentage of a city’s budget that may be derived from fines and fees, much discretion is still left to the court in regard to indigent defendants (Thompson et al., 2024, p.6). Moreover, these authors found that fines assessed on Black versus White defendants before and after the reforms of SB5 remained largely unchanged, showcasing how novel policies can remain insufficient when it comes to addressing their major goals and objectives. While these discrepancies in fines do not necessarily pertain to those who are on community supervision, they are part of the big picture. Next >