Outstanding debt

Squeezing the poor to finance the courts isn’t working

Earlier this year, Oklahoma Policy Institute released a report detailing the growth of fees attached to criminal court cases in Oklahoma. We found that as legislators attempt to prop up falling state revenues, fees have risen for every type of crime. When low-income defendants can’t keep up with payments on their enormous financial burdens to the court, a warrant may be issued for their arrest, leading to a cycle of incarceration that makes the climb out of poverty nearly impossible. Failure to pay court costs is among the most common reasons for bookings into the Tulsa County and Oklahoma County jails.

Though we’ve had a clear sense of the individual-level impact of this debt through the stories of those who are affected, it’s been hard to quantify the impact on communities as a whole. To get a clearer sense of the problem, we collected data on outstanding debts to the court from the state court system’s online ePayments tool for misdemeanor and felony cases filed from 2011 to 2016. The data, available only for 13 counties across the state, includes the age and address of the defendant, the number of charges on their case, and the amount of money they currently owe to the courts. It does not include other amounts that defendants may owe in relation to their case, such as supervision fees due to the Department of Corrections or the District Attorney’s office.

Ryan Gentzler is a policy analyst with Oklahoma Policy Institute. For the rest of this article and more, visit okpolicy.org.