Study: Alabama counties that raised criminal fines also saw jail populations increase

A study released earlier this month found that counties that increase criminal fines and fees also see increases in their jail populations.

The study, published by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA), found that for every additional $100 a county assessed in cumulative criminal court fees, an additional 34 people per 100,000 population were incarcerated.

The study, reviewing data from all 67 counties in the state between 2011 and 2025, found that counties that increased fees by 1% saw  a 1.75% increase in detention rates in their respective jails. Authors suggested “that court fee policy changes have measurable but limited impacts on overall jail detentions, and that larger fee increases produce larger effects.”

“It should really give policymakers pause as they think about the efficacy of using local fees to recoup costs for any local project,” said Leah Nelson, a senior research associate with PARCA, who worked on the study with MDRC, a nonpartisan social policy research organization based in New York City, in an interview on Monday.

Authors said that the study did not find that levying additional criminal fines and fees causes more people to be detained, only that a correlation exists between the two.

But the study provides another data point about the adverse impact of using fines and fees, particularly in the criminal legal system, to generate revenue to pay for services.

“This adds to that by showing that there may actually be a cost to the county, associated with local fees, because you have to pay to keep people in jail,” Nelson said.

The expenses include housing incarcerated people and processing them through the system.

Nelson then said that fines imposed because of a criminal penalty are called fees, but they are meted out when the term of confinement ends, and they are often levied on people who are least able to pay.

“It just adds to this body of research suggesting that criminal justice debt does not work like other fees,” she said. “Every other fee or toll that exists, you have to pay the fee or toll before you can get the thing for.”

People who fail to pay criminal court debt may be issued a summons to appear in court, and judges may order people to serve jail time if they believe they are willfully refusing to pay their fines and fees. Some may be detained if they fail to appear in court because many who owe court debt do not have a stable address to receive the summons.

All face jail time when they encounter law enforcement in the future.

Local governments may also struggle to collect all of the fines and fees that are imposed. Nelson and MDRC published another study in November that focused on residents in Jefferson County, which found that about 42% of people do not pay anything toward their court-imposed fines and fees.

That is in addition to other collateral consequences that people who owe fines and fees faced. In Nelson’s prior research at Alabama Appleseed, a criminal justice reform organization based in Birmingham, 83% of residents across 41 counties in the state who owed fines and fees to the court reported forgoing rent, food, medical bills or other necessities in lieu of court debt. Another 38% claimed to have committed another crime to pay toward their court-imposed fines and fees.

“It is 100% certain that they are not collected at 100%,” Nelson said. “We see that they are collected at far lower rates than taxes of any kind. There are costs to the government of imposing and attempting to collect them, and there are costs to communities of having them and the collections efforts that are made.”