Criminal court fees, earnings, and expenditures: A multi-state RD analysis of survey and administrative data

Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Millions of people in the United States face fines and fees in the criminal court system each year, totaling over $27 billion in overall criminal debt to-date. In this study, we leverage five distinct natural experiments in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin using regression discontinuity designs to evaluate the causal impact of such financial sanctions and user fees. We consider a range of long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, and other self-reported measures of well-being, which we measure through a combination of administrative records on earnings and employment, the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System, and household surveys. We find consistent evidence across the range of natural experiments and subgroup analyses of precise null effects on the population, ruling out long-run impacts larger than +/-3.6% on total earnings and +/-4.7% on total recidivism. Failure to find changes in outcomes undermines popular narratives of poverty traps arising from criminal debt but argues against the use of fines and fees as a source of local revenue and as a crime control tool.

Keywords: criminal justice; fines; deterrence; recidivism; labor market outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H72 J24 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-06.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:23-06

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