On the surface, the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ten years ago—and the protests that erupted in response—did not appear to have anything to do with court-ordered fines and fees. But subsequent reports and investigations brought to light the predatory connection between municipal law enforcement policies and the resulting revenue-generating practices that led to unconstitutional stops, citations, arrests, warrants, and even murder by police. Bringing this unconscionable, community-destroying system to the surface was a lasting legacy of the Ferguson uprising.
A month after Brown’s killing, on September 4, 2014, in response to intense public scrutiny, the Department of Justice began an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. And on March 4, 2015, the federal government issued a scathing analysis of the way the city, guided by racial bias, used fines and fees to unjustly enforce the law and oppress Black citizens. These fines and fees were often levied in response to the most minor law-breaking, such as traffic infractions and walking in the roadway—the kind of everyday conduct that precipitated Brown’s encounter with his killer.
The investigation, commonly referred to as the Ferguson report, details the ways in which “Ferguson law enforcement practices violate[d] the law and undermine[d] community trust, especially among African Americans.” Amid the many findings, municipal court practices relied on “substantial and unnecessary barriers” and imposed “unduly harsh penalties for missed payments or appearances.” Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, was never charged, but one could understand the killing, as, in part, stemming from the aggressive and common policing practices used to patrol, sentence, and collect the city’s second-largest source of revenue: fines and fees.
From the series
Ferguson at Ten
How the police killing of Michael Brown a decade ago propelled the modern decarceral movement.
In the period between the start of the DOJ investigation and the issuance of its report, ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis–based legal advocacy organization, released its own report about municipal fines and fees in St. Louis County, and the resulting criminal debt for residents. The ArchCity Defenders report informed the more in-depth investigation by the DOJ released in 2015, as well as a 238-page national study issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2017. Class action lawsuits and other legal challenges against Ferguson and nearby jurisdictions followed, and in the decade since, some $20 million in settlements has been paid to victims of this system, in part as compensation for their many years of suffering and debt.
Together these actions uncovered the increasing and excessive use of fines and fees in criminal courts, and the disproportionate burden on poor people and African Americans. In other words, the Ferguson uprising represented the moment that policymakers, the public, and practitioners had to face the reality that so many poor, surveilled, and criminalized people already knew in the flesh: the schema of fines and fees foisted upon them was a predatory, extractive, and controlling practice, and a crucial revenue-generating and punishment tool of the criminal legal system. More broadly, this system also represents a symbolic punishment—one that, for many of its victims, can never be repaid. It is, in short, a tool for producing constant marginalization, wielded against people who are poor and predominantly Black.
Looking back ten years, many people will recall Ferguson as a painful moment that sparked a movement, originating from a police officer wantonly and inhumanely killing a young man. Yet Ferguson should also be remembered for the legal attention and national scrutiny that it brought to something many people already felt and knew: that law enforcement officers and the courts often serve as city patrollers out to impose tax-like citations disproportionately on Black citizens. Ferguson shined a light on a criminal legal structure that worked to control people and extract as much money from them as possible; the city’s tax base depended on this system.
And today, all over the country, extractive systems exactly like the one in Ferguson remain fully functional.
Over the past ten years, we have learned that Ferguson was not an anomaly. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a similar united national reaction of pain and anger toward the criminal legal system. Once again, while not directly linked to the predatory system of fines and fees, the broader criminal legal apparatus of street-level policing—and the trauma and brutality of it—reminded the nation, particularly Black communities, that law enforcement views our lives as expendable.
The nation has not healed or changed much. Businesses and institutions may have learned the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and many others may have learned about structural inequalities. Ideas around abolition have gained momentum, and we have come to understand more clearly that the criminal legal system, and its likeness to past systems of social control, cannot be reformed but must be radically reimagined. At the same time, intense backlash from reactionary forces has blunted this progress, and the streets have grown quiet, as have institutions, in fear of social and political retribution.
As a result, ten years after Ferguson, law enforcement officers nationally are still revenue generators, even as they are also expected to serve as social workers, address homelessness, and manage people suffering from poverty and mental disorders. Police are levying taxes, both by imposing citations through fines and fees, and then by collecting them via warrants and arrests related to nonpayment. Within this context, we have begun to understand more fully the connection between policing and the system of monetary sanctions, fines, and fees. Police officers who are not trained to address the vast social problems and structural failures they face on the street are also responsible for generating and collecting revenue from the very people least likely to be able to pay. The result of this vicious, self-reinforcing policing system, as shown by the Ferguson report, includes stigmatization, trauma, and violence for members of Black communities.
We can act on what we already know, and we know enough. Post-Ferguson, a wealth of research has focused on police killings and monetary sanctions. We know how the system of monetary predation heightens the possibility of law enforcement encounters with people, and how this in turn leads to trauma and even death. Research in 2019 found that Black men have a 1 in 1,000 risk of being killed by police. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death. Read that again. Another study found that African Americans are killed by police at a rate 3.5 times higher than white people. In addition, the study found that Latino and Indigenous people also had much higher rates of being killed by the police than white people. Furthermore, cities whose police forces are heavily fines-and-fees reliant have higher rates of police killings than other cities.
While the U.S. criminal legal system has always depended on some form of fines and fees, scholarship suggests the growth in the jurisdictional use of monetary sanctions came about in the 1990s to address the ballooning costs related to paying for mass incarceration. Monetary sanctions create legal consequences for people unable to pay; the web of municipal court practices keeps them tethered to a criminal legal system with a series of “cost points”; under its control, many lose the legal right to drive and vote, live under warrants related to nonpayment, and are even reincarcerated and then charged for room and board.
In addition to the legal consequences, people suffer extreme economic costs when they can’t pay fines and fees. These include an inability to feed their children and to take care of their health; the accruing of debt to cover the cost of their incarceration; and the loss of employment and stable housing. Social consequences also result from monetary sanctions: People experience strain with family and friend networks, and suffer from anxiety and depression. Communities of color disproportionately bear the burden of this fiscal punishment. In sum, this system is predatory in nature, infused with inequality, and focused on wealth extraction.
This is not to say that nothing has been done. Alongside legal settlements related to Ferguson, there have been national and state-level reforms to the system of monetary sanctions—albeit incrementally.
In 2015 the White House, in conjunction with the DOJ, commissioned a white paper outlining issues and concerns with monetary sanction processes nationally. The DOJ then issued a package of resources in 2016: a Dear Colleague Letter reminding judges that people could not be legally incarcerated solely for inability to pay; five “Price of Justice” grants awarded to help states examine their fines-and-fees practices; fiscal support for the creation of a National Task Force on Fines, Fees and Bail Practices; and a resource guide on assessing and enforcing monetary sanctions. In 2021 the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security held a hearing on fines and fees, but no further action has been taken at the national level.
Several states and local jurisdictions have begun revising policies and statutes governing monetary sanctions and related punishments. In general, research has grouped the policy aims into four categories:
- Limiting the extent to which jurisdictions can rely on revenue generated from fines and fees
- Providing relief for indigent individuals at or after sentencing
- Eliminating certain types of discretionary fines and fees
- Ending the suspension or revocation of driver’s licenses related to failure to pay traffic tickets or court costs
For example, in 2018 California abolished all administrative fees imposed in juvenile delinquency cases. Other jurisdictions—including the states of Delaware, Oregon, Nevada, New Jersey, and Maryland—limited or abolished juvenile civil fines and court costs, as well as limited fiscal charges to parents and guardians. In the same year, the Washington state legislature barred courts from imposing any discretionary costs to people deemed indigent and ended interest on non-restitution fiscal penalties. Building on these changes, the same legislature in 2023 eliminated all monetary sanctions to people deemed to be indigent.
Furthermore, in many jurisdictions, unpaid parking tickets and court fines and fees can lead to driver’s license suspension or revocation, with negative consequences for employment and family responsibilities. Illinois, New Mexico, Vermont, Minnesota, and other states have taken various steps to stop or curtail these practices.
While not a full abolishment of fines and fees, the California and Washington reforms should be seen as a model for all states. These are incremental policy steps toward the needed abolishment of all monetary sanctions.
After all the protests, legal settlements, and policy changes in our post-Ferguson world, people still experience the burden of fines and fees as a pound of flesh.
In 2021 the Fines and Fees Justice Center commissioned a report on outstanding national debt related to court-imposed fines and fees. Data were only available for twenty-five states, but in those states alone criminal legal debt added up to $27 billion—in other words, that was the amount those states deemed uncollectable. Put differently, in just the half of U.S. states we have data for, there is already enough court debt to average out to $107 for each adult living in the United States. We can likely assume that if we had data for every state, it would easily double that amount.
So where do we go from here? As I have written, our system of monetary sanctions is a contemporary iteration of the perennial U.S. system of social control and wealth extraction from poor people and people of color. This appendage of the criminal legal system allows the state to monitor, control, and extract what little means already marginalized citizens have. Ferguson only exposed the system, but did not severely upset it. Instead, like systems of chattel slavery, debt peonage, prison labor, and work release, controlling and extractive systems will keep morphing until we collectively say no.
Tactics to challenge and create reform must be nimble enough to simultaneously handle the system’s durability, our cultural obsession with accountability, personal responsibility, and unremitting punishment. When speaking with policymakers, we need to illustrate the fundamental illogic of the system. We need to continue to organize our communities, listen to the experiences and ideas of those affected by the criminal legal system, and generate research that sheds light on the broad and nuanced ways fines and fees hurt people, their families, and communities. We must continue to illuminate how this system is routinely not set up to provide lasting public safety, let alone restitution to victims and society at large.
Today, we know that Ferguson was just the tip of the iceberg. This predatory financial system—a legacy of racial capitalism—buries so many people, all over the country.
Personally, Ferguson was the moment I realized that, just like generations before me, generations after me will continue having to fight for justice and equality in this country. We, and the generations after us, will always be in this movement for social justice and reform. Maybe I had been naive, that it took me until I was a mid-career researcher of the criminal legal system to have this realization about the perpetual nature of this struggle. I fear that I will write a similar essay ten years from now, at which time there will yet again have been only incremental steps toward reforming our criminal legal system and its monetary sanctions appendage. Yes, we need to find ways to give people immediate legal relief from fiscal penalties—that is, any policy change, even if only incremental, which will alleviate court debt and related harms is welcome—but we also need the full abolition of fines and fees associated with the criminal legal system. In a society founded upon, and infused with, economic and racial inequality, a criminal legal system can never be “just” as long as it has a system of punishment based on monetary sanctions. Ferguson showed us this. Let us not forget.
Image: Paul Sableman/Flickr
