“The Deck is Stacked”: Legal Cynicism in the Domain of Criminal Justice Debt

• In Event: Negotiating the Challenges of Reentry

Abstract

In the U.S. today, people owe local, state, and federal governments billions of dollars in unpaid debt related to contact with the criminal justice system. This debt stems from a system of Criminal Justice Financial Obligations (CJFOs) that is complex, vast, and growing. While the issue of fines and fees and their deleterious effects on individuals and communities is starting to emerge in national discourse, to truly advance sound policy in this domain we must understand the personal realities of having criminal justice debt. To that end, we collected data from 57 semi-structured interviews with CJFO debtors, using questions focused on the social and economic processes related to (non)payment of criminal justice debt. While legal cynicism has typically been applied to law enforcement, we find that the framework also yields illuminating insights in the domain of monetary sanctions. Indeed, insofar as people experience monetary sanctions as disproportionate—and therefore unfair—punishment, we find that criminal justice debt engenders distrust of the state, skepticism about the motives of state actors, and reluctance to engage with public agencies. Given that the original intent of monetary sanctions was to avoid the harms of incarceration, the findings have myriad implications for policy and practice.

Authors

• Karin Martin, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Kimberly Spencer-Suarez, Columbia University