In Washington state, many counties in recent years have supplemented their revenues through court-imposed fines such as traffic citations and court processing fees.
At the same time, those counties have increased the rate at which they sentence women to jail.
This association, according to new research from the University of Washington, indicates that monetary sanctions, also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs, have far-reaching social, economic and punitive effects. In other words, what may seem like a system of low-level penalties aimed at individuals actually affects whole communities.
“Here in Washington state, men’s incarceration rates have been trending downward for over a decade whereas women’s incarceration rates have continued to increase,” said lead author Kate O’Neill, a UW postdoctoral researcher in sociology. “This paper suggests this is because women have not benefitted from the legal system’s shift away from carceral sentencing toward monetary sanction sentencing in the same ways men have benefitted.”
The study is part of a volume of research on legal financial obligations, published online in January in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. Alexes Harris, professor of sociology at the UW, spearheaded the multi-institutional study of trends and practices in eight states over five years relating to legal fines and fees.
Read more in UW News