This commentary was originally published by the Alabama Daily News.

Two years ago, the city of Brookside, Alabama, made national news when investigative journalists exposed that it had turned policing into a for-profit business.

The reporters’ revelations were damning: In a town of only 1,253 people, with virtually no serious crimes, police in 2020 had written tickets amounting to $487 per resident.

Brookside is not the only U.S. jurisdiction accused of funding its justice system via taxation-by-citation—nor did this problem grow up overnight. Over the past 50 years, the practice gradually took hold due to a combination of tough-on-crime policies, resulting upticks in incarceration, and budget cuts to state and local justice systems.

The issue exploded onto the national scene ten years ago this summer, when protests in Ferguson, Missouri, focused not only on the killing of a Black teenager by a police officer, but also on what the U.S. Department of Justice later described as an “approach to law enforcement, shaped by the City’s pressure to raise revenue, [that] has resulted in a pattern and practice of constitutional violations.”

Fines and fees might seem like a good idea: Less harsh than incarceration, and a way to make people who break the law pay for the costs they impose on society. But the experiences of people in Brookside, Ferguson, and all over the country suggest that this strategy is unfair and destructive.

There are three major problems with trying to fund justice systems through fines and fees.

First, such an approach spurs law enforcement officers to look harder for people to fine, eroding community trust.

Second, the people targeted tend to lack the means to pay the fine, creating an ever-deepening cycle of debt as late fees and other surcharges pile up.

Third, a disproportionate number of the people trapped in this cycle are Black, exacerbating racial inequalities in the justice system and beyond.

Here in Alabama, a pioneering partnership between researchers and judges is working to quantify the damage and develop fairer alternatives.

In an unprecedented gesture of transparency and openness to reform, the Jefferson County Circuit Court provided case-level data to analysts at the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a state-level advocacy group, and MDRC, a national social policy nonprofit, so that we can gather evidence about the negative impact of these practices and identify ways to improve the system.

This path-breaking work suggests that Jefferson County, and Alabama as a whole, could lead the way in reversing a national trend that has harmed too many people for too long.

A Mistake with Compound Interest

Our research demonstrates that that same patterns of inefficiency and unfairness that plague many corners of the criminal justice system are also playing out in Jefferson County—and very likely in the rest of Alabama, as fines and fees imposed throughout the state are, for the most part, set by the legislature and regulated by the Administrative Office of Courts.

Consider the lifecycle of one of the most common fine-inducing crimes, writing a bad check. In Jefferson County, the average person charged with this crime is a Black woman in her 40s who might, for instance, have paid for groceries with a $100 check without realizing she has less than that in her bank account.

This might not sound too serious, but court fees and interest pile up if the obligation is not paid off right away. In the case of a $100 check, the debt grows to a median of just under $770, a balance that the typical Jefferson County debtor will struggle indefinitely to pay off.

Worthless check cases have declined in number as we move to a more digital economy, but the problem of debt that balloons and then follows the people who owe it for a lifetime remains unchanged. In our study of 9,000 people who owed fines and fees in Jefferson County, the median debtor paid nothing at all toward their debt—likely because the vast majority of debtors were indigent, meaning they lacked money to pay for lawyers or, presumably, to pay fines and fees. People who struggle to pay are punished: After 90 days in arrears, state law automatically increases their debt by 30 percent.

According to Alabama’s Attorney General, that debt can never be forgiven, which sets this form of debt apart from any other fine, fee, or even restitution that is owed to victims, all of which judges can forgive under certain circumstances. This pits the interests of district attorneys, who keep most of the revenue from this collections fee, against that of crime victims and all other agencies that are due funding from fine and fee revenue.

In addition to harming individual debtors who make desperate choices to stay current on their payments, excessive fines and fees are inefficiently administered and undermine community safety as a whole:

People who owe court debt are disproportionately likely to be poor. Most never finish paying what they owe. But partial payments rarely benefit crime victims because in Alabama the software that disburses these funds prioritizes an array of unrelated entities and special projects over victims who are owed restitution for crime-related costs. While judges have some ability to override this default system, regulatory precedent and software limitations narrow their discretion substantially.

Court debt makes it harder for police to solve violent crimes. One national study found that police departments in cities that rely heavily on court debt for revenue tend to solve violent crimes at a lower rate than those in cities reliant on other revenue sources. One theory as to why: people in those cities regard police as debt collectors with badges, so they avoid talking to or cooperating with them.

And court debt promotes crime. Appleseed’s 2018 survey of Alabama residents who owed fines and fees showed that almost four in 10 said they had committed a crime to raise funds to pay off their debt, most often drug sales, theft, or sex work.

Fixing a Broken System

It doesn’t have to be this way. In the wake of news about Brookside, Alabama lawmakers took decisive action to reign in the worst abuses, passing laws limiting how much municipalities can rely on fines as a source of funding, requiring cities to report revenue from fines and fees, and curbing debt-based driver’s license suspensions.

There is more work to do to make this inefficient and unfair system work better. Lawmakers should follow Jefferson County’s example, examine data from all jurisdictions, and decide which of the many fines and fees they’ve added on over the years are due to be trimmed. Giving this hidden tax system a much-needed haircut wouldn’t cost money: Our research shows that excessive fines and fees result in uncollectible debt rather than creating additional revenue.

Of course, as with many social policy challenges, it will take creative thinking and collaboration across multiple branches of government to fully unravel the problems caused by excessive fines and fees. In part, this is because we still know relatively little about this issue. While mass incarceration and its consequences have drawn intense scrutiny for decades, fines and fees—which affect far more people than incarceration—have remained largely unexamined until now.

That is why the Jefferson County Court’s willingness to examine its practices represents an unprecedented opportunity to see what happens after fines and fees are assessed and understand the lifelong challenges they can pose for people. We are optimistic that this partnership will inspire other jurisdictions seeking to administer justice more fairly—not only by quantifying court debt’s harms, but also by revealing ways to hold people accountable that don’t permanently damage their ability to lead healthy, productive lives.

Sarah Picard directs MDRC’s Center for Criminal Justice Research and Leah Nelson is Research Director at the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.