Beyond the Penal Code: The Sprawling Presence of Monetary Sanctions in California Law

• In Event: Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions

Abstract

Despite the burgeoning scholarship on monetary sanctions in America, much of our knowledge about LFOs is restricted to penal codes. Yet, there is reason to believe that a wider expanse of other legislative codes harbor and levy fines and fees on defendants convicted of criminal offenses. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which seemingly distal legislative code sections impose similar forms of punishment as penal codes. Drawing on a unique dataset created to assess LFOs in California, we show that monetary sanctioning statutes are spread across all of California’s 29 legislative codes, thereby levying some form of legal financial obligation on individuals convicted of a crime and regulating budgetary allocations for the revenues generated. We also assess whether disparities exist in the LFOs codified across legislative code sections. Findings from our work speak to the importance of breaking civil-criminal binaries to understand the totality of legal impacts and the systemic nature of growing social inequality in monetary sanctions as economic barriers to the re-entry process.

Authors

• Anjuli Verma, University of California, Berkeley

• Bryan L Sykes, University of California-Irvine

• Marni Mattei, University of California-Irvine

• Hayden Sugg, University of California-Irvine

• Sar Vang, University of California-Irvine