Fees, Fines,and theFunding of Public Services

Given that 2018, the Liman Center at Yale Regulation University and Harvard Regulation School’s Legal Justice Coverage Program (CJPP), in partnership with the Fines &Charges Justice Center and the BerkeleyLawPolicy Advocacy Clinic, have collaborated to mitigate the challenges confronted by peopleof limited indicates and sources who interact with criminal punishmentsystems all over the United States.By a series of workshops and components, we have examined how legislation has enabledand, on celebration, limitedtheseharms, expert disproportionately by communities of color.

Finances pressures are element of what drivesstate and local governmentsto depend on financial sanctions.Reform effortshave, at situations, beenstymied by arguments that governments “need” the income created byregressive fines and costs. In 2008, through and afterthe Great Economic downturn, condition and local governments responded to sudden funds pressures by looking for new streams of revenues—includingfrom a host of legal assessments. Offered that encounter, we know that the economic disruptions established by the recent COVID-19crisiswill most likely consequence ingovernments’consideringadditional use of financial sanctions and “user”fee financing to deliver revenue.The recent economic constraints spot strains on subnational budgets even much more acute than these expert a dozen decades in the past. Thus, we dread that governments may well scale up the imposition and the enforcement of financial sanctions. Extra tools are required to resist these endeavours, as the economic consequences of the pandemicwill frame the decades to arrive.