RESUMO
Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals' rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.
RESUMO
In this article, we explore the experiences of people who carry monetary sanction (or penal) debt across eight U.S. states. Using 519 interviews with people sentenced to fines and fees, we analyze the mental and emotional aspects of their experiences. Situating our analysis within research on the social determinants of health and the stress universe, we suggest that monetary sanctions create an overwhelmingly palpable sense of fear, frustration, anxiety, and despair. We theorize the ways in which monetary sanctions function as both acute and chronic health stressors for people who are unable to pay off their debts, highlight the mechanisms linking penal debt with mental and emotional burdens, and generalize our findings using national data from the U.S. Federal Reserve. We find that the system of monetary sanctions generates a great deal of stress and strain that becomes an internalized punishment affecting many realms of people's lives.