“Expanding Criminal Legal Systems Through Traffic Enforcement: A Lost History”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Jordan Blair Woods. Here is its abstract:

Many cities, villages, and towns rely on fines, fees, and other monetary sanctions from traffic and low-level offense enforcement to fund government operations and programs.  These widespread practices fall heaviest on the most financially and socially vulnerable individuals and communities, including low-income individuals and over-policed communities of color.  A dominant story in criminal justice literature and advocacy traces these problems to the “tough on crime” movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.  Under this account, criminal legal systems became more expensive to operate and state and local governments started to shift the costs to “users” of those systems (namely, criminal defendants).

This Article illustrates that this conventional wisdom is too simplistic.  Through excavation and synthesis of historical data, this Article fashions two original historical case studies on traffic enforcement in the early decades of the twentieth century.  The case studies illuminate a much longer history of city governments relying on low-level offense enforcement as a means of funding and expanding the criminal legal apparatus.  The historical analysis shows how surging city collections in traffic fines and bail forfeitures coincided with expansions of police, courts, and criminal traffic laws at the time.  Moreover, leading government officials touted the revenue-generating potential of traffic enforcement alongside public safety and congestion concerns surrounding motor vehicles in order to justify expanding police, courts, and criminal traffic laws.  In many instances, the harshest criminal consequences of these revenue-generating systems fell on taxi drivers, delivery drivers, and chauffeurs — many of whom were from working-class and immigrant communities, and operated automobiles as wage laborers for companies or wealthy and middle-class automobile owners.

The historical case studies make an important contribution to the literature in their own right.  This Article, however, also connects the case studies to frameworks in “historical criminology” to identify and explore three key takeaways for problems involving government revenue generation through low-level offense enforcement today.  First, the historical analysis highlights a need for more nuance in how criminal justice scholars and advocates discuss the origins and causes of problems surrounding government revenue generation through low-level offense enforcement.  Second, the analysis provides fresh perspective on the limits of “bad apples” theories in crafting criminal justice reforms. Those theories define criminal justice problems in terms of the individual behaviors and motives of rogue actors in the criminal legal system as opposed to structural flaws or biases with the system itself.  Third, the analysis offers fresh historical insight into the role of mandatory monetary sanctions in generating revenue for governments via low-level offense enforcement and the harms of mandatory monetary sanctions in punishing economically vulnerable and disadvantaged individuals.