What is the User-Pay Criminal Justice System?

As we all probably remember from grade-school civics classes, there are three branches of government: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. In Louisiana, we directly fund two of those branches–Executive and Legislative–but we almost entirely fail to directly fund the Judicial branch. 

The lack of direct funding for the judicial branch means court and law enforcement officers largely have to fund themselves through fines, fees, and costs. So they are incentivized to add new fines and fees, increase the amounts of those fines and fees, and aggressively collect the money from those fines and fees.

Those financial burdens mostly fall on the people who can least afford them, which adds another burden to folks who already face enormous obstacles in their lives, and it helps to trap them in generational cycles of poverty and criminalization. By disrupting the user-pay system, we hope to also disrupt those cycles.

In order to shine more light on how the user-pay system actually works, one of our College Fellows, Merrilee Montgomery, a student at Tulane University, created a tool (see below) to track how fines and fees money is collected and distributed on a parish-by-parish level. Her tool scraped data from reports that local governments submitted to the Louisiana Legislative Auditor and made it accessible through easily navigable charts and graphs. We recommend that you play around with Merrilee’s invention to gain a deeper understanding of how Louisiana’s user-pay system works.