Alabama’s criminal justice funding methods may impact compensation for crime victims • Alabama Reflector

“Very often people know the person they owe a refund to, it could be their grandmother, it could be their mother’s friend,” said Leah Nelson, a researcher who worked on the report. “They know they’re paying for their fines and fees, and yet the person tells their mother or tells them, ‘You know, I don’t see any of the money.'”

With collections declining for a decade, the Alabama Crime Victims Compensation Commission, long funded through fines and fees, has begun seeking funding from the Legislature to cover operating costs.

According to the authors of the briefing, the inefficiencies are due to the way the state distributes the fines and fees it collects. District attorneys and courts take precedence, while agencies that support crime victims follow.

Researchers said the funds do not follow a formula but are issued in a cascade structure. Priority institutions receive the majority of the collections. After receiving a share, payments are shifted to other agencies and priorities, including victim restitution.

The report cites a fee known as the D999 collection fee, which imposes a 30% fee on accounts that are 90 days past due. According to researchers, this money is divided between prosecutors and courts.

“The priority system picks winners and losers,” Nelson said. “The debt collector is the winner and the victims are the losers. They are entitled to a refund, but they tend to default to last on the priority list.”

Incarcerating people because of outstanding court debts is even more costly. The report states that this could cost up to 115% of the amount recovered.

“And then there’s the Crime Victims Compensation Commission, which is number 17 on the priority list,” Nelson said.

The policy brief is consistent with other research that has found that fines and fees harm people in poverty, particularly people of color who are unable to repay their debts because they simply do not have the means to pay .

According to the brief, approximately 60% of those deemed indigent had paid nothing towards the fines and fees owed, while another 18% managed to pay the balance in full.

“I think the fact that most people are paying zero dollars on their debt is really significant,” Nelson said. “It suggests there is a problem with the collection process and probably with the imposition process as well.”

The compliance rate for those the court did not consider indigent is slightly better: about 30% of those paid nothing for their fines and fees, while 45% had paid their debts in full.

Black Alabamians made up the majority of people classified as needy, researchers said.

The report said defendants who were indigent faced larger fines than those who were not. The average legal financial obligation (LFO) for those in the system is more than $900, but the average is higher for blacks than whites.

“In fact, the people who were found to be indigent had more debt than those who were not,” Nelson said. “And that’s really concerning because the court went through the trouble of finding these people who couldn’t afford a lawyer. But then somehow these people have more debt than people who weren’t classified as indigent.”

Researchers said an additional penalty for accounts that are 90 days or more past due contributes to the disparities.

The net effect is that people are unable to pay their obligations, “black and vulnerable individuals are more likely to default on their LFOs,” and that fine and fee debt is more concentrated among communities of color in Jefferson County.

“When you think about collection rates, we don’t do a good job of collecting these 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 those dollars, it’s also very costly. You have to track people, send reminders, do all of these things, often for just a few hundred dollars, so in many ways the government spends as much or sometimes more money to collect the fines and fees.”

Other reports have found similar inefficiencies in other states. A report released in 2019 by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute, found that counties in Texas and New Mexico spent more than 41 cents of every dollar in revenue trying to collect fines and fees.

Some of the inefficiencies are due to the court and the slow adoption of technology to simplify the debt collection process.

“Often jurisdictions don’t communicate with each other. “So if you have multiple cases, it’s difficult to see where you owe and how much you owe in those cases,” Jones said. “Even if they want to pay fines and fees, it can be very difficult for them to make the payment.”

That being said, courts may never realize the benefits of the fines and fees they impose.

“It is one of the most inefficient methods because for many people who owe fines and fees they are simply unable to pay them. So it’s like trying to get blood from a stone,” said Lauren Jones, legal and policy director of the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School in New York.

The New Mexico Legislature eliminated all post-processing fees for adults in criminal courts in 2023, eliminating the reliance on fines and fees to maintain court operations. According to a report from the Vera Institute of Justice, the state joins California as the only states in the country to have eliminated such fees.

Lauren Jones also said other states have taken similar measures that would at least ease the burden on low-income residents.

An NCAJ report pointed to Illinois, where judges are using guidelines to reduce fines and fees levied at predetermined percentages indexed to the federal poverty line.

Such practices do not exist in Alabama, leaving many low-income residents vulnerable.

“People say, ‘Look, I’m choosing between food and a debt I’ll never pay off,'” Nelson said. “‘I choose food.'”