A little more than ten years ago, Michael Brown was murdered by the Ferguson, Missouri police.¹ Subsequent protests and the federal Department of Justice’s investigation thrust monetary sanctions – fees, fines, and restitution charged in criminal courts – into the spotlight because in Ferguson, “law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than public safety needs.”²  

Monetary sanctions continue to harm people across the country and in Washington state, especially those marginalized by the racism, classism, ableism, and geographic disparity inherent to the criminal legal system. This senseless harm is the real problem with monetary sanctions.³  One way policymakers attempt to justify this harm is by saying budgets depend on monetary sanction revenue. However, these policymakers and system administrators never have data to prove it. This post aims to highlight the deeply flawed logic underlying such claims.  

We estimate that statewide, Washington is losing money – with court administrators spending $89.5 million per year to collect monetary sanction debt from residents who don’t have the resources to pay and who are struggling to make ends meet. Based on our calculations, Washington spent more than $268 million in county and state resources to generate $123.5 million in revenue over three years.

Understanding monetary sanctions 

Criminal courts in Washington can order individuals to pay money for any number of reasons. Fees are designed only to recover the costs to the government of operating the criminal legal system and can be charged for things like booking a person into jail, pre-trial incarceration, or exercising constitutional rights like trial by jury or representation by a public defender. Fines are intended to punish. Restitution is a payment from a person who caused harm to the person they harmed as compensation for their loss. However, in practice, restitution is often paid to insurance companies and government entities like the police.⁴ In Washington, these different costs are often grouped together as legal financial obligations (LFOs), although I prefer the term monetary sanctions for various reasons.⁵ 

Significant research demonstrates how monetary sanctions trap Washingtonians in poverty and a cycle of criminalization.⁶ Most recently and most rigorously, the Washington State Center for Court Research analyzed a huge dataset from every county and court in the state and was able to show statewide trends in the assessment and collection of monetary sanctions.⁷ However, one key question remains, which the Supreme Court’s Minority and Justice Commission (MJC) identified and was unable to answer years ago: How much does it cost to collect monetary sanction debt from Washingtonians?⁸  

Calculating the cost of collections

To get a rough estimate of how much it costs to collect monetary sanction debt, Molly Webster, former senior policy analyst with the Budget and Policy Center, and I separated the cost of collections into three buckets: 1) Routine, administrative costs to superior courts (courts that handle felony and some misdemeanor cases), 2) administrative costs to courts of limited jurisdiction (or district and municipal courts), and 3) costs associated with court hearings – for example, hearings on petitions to waive debt, probation review hearings about (or partly about) court debt, or appeals dealing with orders for monetary sanctions.⁹ Each of these buckets is discussed in greater detail below.  

Administrative costs to superior courts 

We estimate the administrative cost of collecting monetary sanction debt in superior courts to be $2 million per year. The state appropriates money to support local courts in collecting these fees and fines from people. In 2025, that state block grant totals $441,000.¹⁰ That obviously does not cover the full cost of collections. While most counties don’t report the total cost of collecting monetary sanctions in their budgets, of those that do, only 20.67% of the costs are covered by the state block grant.¹¹ (See the table below for more detail.): 

Click on image to enlarge.

Administrative costs to courts of limited jurisdiction 

We estimate the administrative cost of collecting monetary sanction debt in courts of limited jurisdiction (CLJs), or district and municipal courts, to be $9.6 million per year.¹²

Unlike superior courts in Washington, many CLJs contract with debt-collection agencies to track down outstanding LFO debt.¹³ Private, for-profit debt-collection companies hired to collect this debt can make matters worse for individuals and families burdened by monetary sanctions by charging excessive interest rates and added fees. In Washington, debt collectors can tack on additional fees of up to 100% of the original, court-imposed debt. While many other states also authorize private collection fees, Washington is a uniquely bad actor in how high collection agencies’ added fees can be – by comparison, in Florida, collectors can charge individuals 40% of the total debt, and in Alabama and Texas, up to 30%.¹⁴  

Cost of hearings 

We estimate the total governmental cost of court hearings dealing with monetary sanction debt in Washington to be $77.8 million per year. This total is based on a 2020 study of San Francisco criminal cases, which found that a single hearing about court debt cost the county $1,343.¹⁵ According to the Washington State Center for Court Research, about 70% of criminal cases (161,964 cases filed last year) have at least one monetary sanction imposed,¹⁶ and for this estimate, we assume that there would be at least one hearing per year in half of those cases. 

Without a doubt, the costliest aspect of monetary sanction collection is the government’s response to nonpayment. This can look like a regular probation review hearing about court debt, a one-off hearing on a motion to reduce or waive debt, or an appeal of a monetary sanction. Any such hearings take a percentage of salaried government employees’ time – judges, lawyers, court reporters, bailiffs, clerks, and other staff. It also involves the use of physical space and resources in government buildings.  

The Supreme Court Minority and Justice Commission was not able to estimate the cost of collecting monetary sanctions for its 2022 report. However, in that report, one county clerk estimated that court hearings for restitution alone took 533 clerk hours per year.¹⁷ This is more than 25% of the annual work hours of a full-time employee, and does not even consider other clerk time spent, outside of hearings, administering Washington’s system of monetary sanctions. It also does not consider any time spent on hearings or administration of fees and fines – that clerk was only reporting time spent on restitution. Furthermore, “LFO hearings” is a weekly docket in at least Spokane and Pend Oreille counties,¹⁸ which supports the idea that there is a significant number of hearings. Therefore, as astronomical as it seems, $77.8 million may underestimate the cost of hearings. 

Lawmakers must address the true costs of monetary sanctions 

Using the above estimates, we found that Washington spent more than $268 million to generate $123.5 million in revenue over the past three years.¹⁹ This is consistent with findings in Oregon, California, Montana, and Idaho where courts and other government entities were losing money on their systems of monetary sanctions.²⁰ It is worth noting that this cost estimate entirely leaves out less identifiable costs of monetary sanctions – for example, the time spent by sheriffs serving warrants for outstanding fees and fines, the costs of extended supervision or monitoring because people can’t pay, and the aggregate loss to the Washington economy of maintaining criminal records and keeping people in misery because they are unable to pay insurmountable, court-imposed debt. It also does not account for the impact of watershed law changes like State v. Blake, which required the state to refund tens of millions of dollars in unconstitutionally obtained monetary sanctions. Although the real downside of monetary sanctions is the harm it does to the people in the system, as a pure cost-benefit analysis, decision makers might want to ask themselves – when it comes to fees, fines, and restitution, is the juice really worth the squeeze?

This legislative session, decisionmakers have another opportunity to change this broken, unsustainable, and harmful system. In recent years, advocates have pushed for important reforms to the monetary sanction system in Washington state including eliminating fines and fees for young people and allowing judges to waive many monetary sanctions for people living on low incomes. 

Lawmakers must build upon past successes and pass House Bill 1499 this session, which would eliminate fees that advocates call “poverty fees.” Poverty fees are levied against defendants to recuperate the costs of specific court services that people are unable to cover themselves. For example, this legislation would eliminate Washington’s public defense fee, which is still imposed even though the people who pay it by definition do not have the funds to pay for a lawyer themselves. Over 80% of people moving through the criminal legal system live on low incomes or are unable to pay these monetary sanctions.  

Eliminating poverty fees could be a win-win by reducing administrative burdens on courts across Washington struggling to collect monetary sanction debts, and, more importantly, by reducing harm to individuals and families across our state. 

***

Gus Patel-Tupper is a supervising attorney in the Policy Advocacy Clinic at Berkeley Law. He leads research and advocacy projects in support of racial, social, and economic justice, focused in the Pacific Northwest, where he’s from.  

Former Budget and Policy Center Senior Policy Analyst Molly Webster  contributed to this guest blog post.