“The High Cost of a Fresh Start: A State-By-State Analysis Of Court Debt As A Bar To Record Clearing”

The title of this post is the title of this new report produced by the National Consumer Law Center and the Collateral Consequences Resource Center.  The report examined how court debt — such as criminal fines, fees, costs, and restitution — serves as impediment to record clearing.  Here is the start of the report’s executive summary:

For the nearly one-third of adults in the U.S. with a record of arrest or conviction, their record is not simply part of their past but a continuing condition that impacts nearly every aspect of their life.  Their record makes it hard to get a job and support a family, secure a place to live, contribute to the community, and participate fully in civic affairs.

In recent years, most states have passed laws aimed at restoring economic opportunity, personal freedoms, and human dignity to millions of these individuals by providing a path to clear their record.  But for too many, this relief remains out of reach because of monetary barriers, including not only the cost of applying for record clearing but also the requirement in many jurisdictions that applicants satisfy debt incurred as part of the underlying criminal case before they can have their record cleared.  This can be a high bar: the total amount of fines and fees can run to thousands of dollars for even minor infractions and can be considerably higher for felonies.

People prevented from clearing their record because they cannot afford to pay are usually those most in need of relief.  And, perversely, because a record significantly impairs economic opportunity, having an open record makes it harder to pay off fines and fees and therefore harder to qualify for record clearing.  This burden falls especially heavily on Black and Brown communities, which are more likely to have high concentrations of both criminal records and poverty because of structural racism in criminal law enforcement and in the economy.  Ability-to-pay tests and similar waiver approaches to reduce or eliminate monetary barriers to record clearing have been shown to be poor safeguards in many contexts.

This report explores the extent to which restricting access to record clearing based on outstanding criminal fines, fees, costs, and restitution — collectively known as “court debt” — may prevent poor and low-income people from getting a second chance.  After surveying research on the importance of record clearing and the mushrooming financial burdens imposed on criminal defendants, it analyzes the extent to which outstanding court debt is a barrier to record clearing under the laws of each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal system.  Our study focuses in particular on generally applicable statutory authorities for clearing adult criminal convictions; it excludes record-clearing authorities available for other categories of records (e.g., non-conviction records) or for specific categories of individuals (e.g., victims of human trafficking).