Northport residents await their court appearances at the Northport Public Safety Building in Northport, Ala., on Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023. A recent report found that Alabama’s method funding criminal justice makes it difficult for crime victims to collect restitution. (Will McLelland for Alabama Reflector)
A recent report found that Alabama’s method of funding its criminal justice system may affect the ability of crime victims to receive compensation.
The report is a project of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice in collaboration with University of Alabama Birmingham; Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and the 10th Judicial Circuit, which includes Birmingham.
The brief, published in August, builds on earlier work that found Alabama’s reliance on fines and fees to fund courts is inefficient and creates hardship for people living in poverty. But researchers also concluded that the inefficiencies complicate efforts to get payments to crime victims.
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“Very often, people know the person they owe restitution to, it might be their grandmother, it might be their mom’s friend,” said Leah Nelson, a researcher who worked on the report. “They know they are paying toward their fines and fees, and yet the person is telling their mom or telling them, ‘You know, I am not seeing any of that money.’”
With declining collections dating back a decade, the Alabama Crime Victims Compensation Commission, which has long been funded through fines and fees, has begun seeking funding from the Legislature to help pay for operational costs.
According to the brief’s authors, the inefficiencies stem from how the state distributes the fines and fees it collects. District attorneys and the courts get priority, while agencies that assist crime victims come after.
Researchers said that instead of following a formula, the funds go out in a cascading structure. Priority entities receive the bulk of the collections. After they receive a share, payments will shift to other agencies and priorities, including victim restitution.
The report cites a fee known as the D999 Collections Fee, which imposes a 30% charge on accounts that are overdue for 90 days. According to researchers, that money is split between district attorneys and the courts.
“The priority system picks winners and losers,” Nelson said. “The collection fee is the winner, and the victims are the losers. They are owed restitution, but they are typically the last thing on the priority list by default.”
Incarcerating people for outstanding court debt is even more costly, with the report citing that it could cost as much as 115% of the amount collected.
“And then there is the Crime Victims Compensation Commission, which is number 17 on the priority list,” Nelson said.
The policy brief aligns with other research that found that fines and fees hurt those in poverty, particularly people of color, who are not able to pay back their debt because they simply do not have the means to pay.
According to the brief, about 60% of those identified as indigent had paid nothing toward the fines and fees that were owed, while another 18% managed to pay the balance off completely.
“I think the fact that most people pay zero dollars for their debt is really significant,” Nelson said. “It indicates that there is a problem with the collections process and probably the impositions process.”
The compliance rate for those the court did not consider indigent is slightly better, with about 30% of those having not paid anything toward their fines and fees while 45% had completely paid what they owed.
Black Alabamians comprised the majority of those classified as indigent, researchers said.
The report states that indigent defendants faced more financial penalties than those who were not. The average legal financial obligations (LFO) for those in the system come out to more than $900, but the average is higher for people who are Black as opposed to whites.
“In fact, the people who were found indigent owed more than those who were not,” Nelson said. “And that is really troubling, because the court has gone through the trouble of finding these people who could not afford a lawyer. But then somehow those people end up owing more money than people who were not found to be indigent.”
Researchers said an additional penalty on accounts that are 90 days or more overdue contributes to the disparities.
The net effect is that people are not able to pay off their obligations, “that individuals who are Black and indigent were more likely to default on their LFOs,” and that fines and fees debt is more concentrated in communities of color within Jefferson County.
“When you think about collection rates, we do not do a good job of collecting on those things,” said Peter Jones, an associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “And on the cost side, how much money the government has to spend to collect these dollars, it is also very costly. You have to track folks, send out reminders, do all these things, oftentimes for just a few hundred dollars, so the government ends up, in a lot of ways, spending as much or sometimes more money to collect the fines and fees.”
Other reports have found similar inefficiencies in other states. A report published in 2019 by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute, found that counties in both Texas and New Mexico spent more than 41 cents of every dollar in revenue attempting to collect from fines and fees.
Some of the inefficiencies stem from the court and how slowly they have adopted technology that eases the collection process.
“A lot of times, jurisdictions do not talk to each other, so if you have multiple cases, it is difficult to see where you owe and how much you owe across those cases,” Jones said. “Even if they want to pay fines and fees, they can find it very difficult to make the payment.”
Aside from that, courts may never realize the gains on the fines and fees they impose.
“It is one of the most inefficient ways because, for many people who owe fines and fees, they simply do not have the ability to pay, so it is like trying to get blood from a stone,” said Lauren Jones, legal and policy director for the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School in New York.
New Mexico’s legislature eliminated all post-adjudication fees for adults in criminal court in 2023, ending their reliance on fines and fees to keep courts operating. According to a report from the Vera Institute of Justice, the state joined California as the only two states in the country to have eliminated such fees.
Lauren Jones also said that other states have resorted to similar measures that, at least, reduce the burden on low-income residents.
A report from the NCAJ pointed to Illinois, where judges use guidelines to reduce fines and fees that are levied on pre-set percentages indexed to the federal poverty line.
Such practices are not available in Alabama, which leaves many low income residents vulnerable.
“People say ‘Look, I am choosing between food and a debt that I am never going to finish paying,’” Nelson said. “‘I choose food.’”
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