Fines and Fees in Flux: Exploring Changes in Municipal Violation Sentencing after Court Reform

Monetary sanctions are a ubiquitous part of punishment in the criminal legal system. In recent years, highly publicized events have drawn attention to monetary sanctions at the intersection of poverty, race, and legal system contact. The current study uses Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average models to assess monetary sanction reform legislation in St. Louis, Missouri–where the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2015 Ferguson Report implicated monetary sanctions practices as a contributing to tension between the community and the criminal legal system. We find that white defendants experienced an increase in the average amount of fines received (the punishment portion of the sentence), further, the implementation of the reform (modeled as a step function) was associated with increased fee assessments for those receiving monetary sanctions. Further, racial gaps in total assessments across Black and white residents remained, even as fees for Black defendants declined. Our findings highlight how policies can improve some parts of the criminal legal system yet remain insufficient to fully address their stated goals.