This Special Issue with an international & interdisciplinary line-up critically analyzes economic discrimination and poverty sanctions in criminal justice systems around the world.
Criminal justice systems the world over are run through with economic discrimination: from the pre-trial stage (bail, and cash bail in particular) to the trial or bargaining stage (from a lack or scarcity of public defender services to fees for available public defenders, along with various other fees, charges, and hidden taxes) to the sanction stage (fines, more fees, surcharges, restitution, etc.). What’s more, each time an economic sanction isn’t paid, further economic—or non-economic—sanctions are triggered, including imprisonment and a panoply of “collateral” sanctions such as ineligibility for or loss of drivers’ and occupational licenses and public services.
The result is the systemic criminalization of poverty across the entire criminal justice process—wholly apart from the long-familiar roster of individual criminal offenses punishing poverty explicitly or implicitly (vagrancy, loitering, etc.) which has traditionally attracted the lion’s share of judicial and scholarly attention.
The phenomenon of criminal justice systems operating as modern debtors’ prisons cuts across countries and legal systems in the Global South and North. In countries from India to Germany, prison–literally–is imposed as punishment for failing to pay a fine. The practice of using economic penalties as a source of government revenue is also widespread. The Kenyan judiciary finances itself partially through court fees. In the United States, local governments enrich themselves through a net of punitive economic sanctions so dense and wide that many ensnared in it—and notably those living from paycheck to paycheck and, disproportionately, racialized individuals—find it impossible to escape. In effect, they live in a state of perpetual penal peonage that resembles less a modern debtors’ prison (whose occupants, some two centuries ago, enjoyed enough public empathy to result in its demise) and more a form of modern slavery.
Impoverished and Incarcerated: The Ethics of Converting Fines into Community Service
Gustavo A. Beade
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Interrelations of “Debt” and “Guilt” in Criminal Law: Reconsidering a Nietzschean Narrative in the Context of Late Capitalism
Morten Boe
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Fines and the Freedom of Consumption
Patricia Faraldo Cabana
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Location, Relocation, and Dislocation: Sanctioning the Poor Through Document Service in Taiwan’s Criminal Legal System
Mao-hong Lin
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Monetary Sanctions and Poverty in Malawi’s Criminal Justice System
Chikondi M. Mandala & Sarai Chisala Tempelhoff
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Retaining the “Premium on Poverty”: India’s Perplexing Persistence with a Monetary Bail Regime
Abhinav Sekhri
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Settler Colonialism and Financial Predation
Brieanna Watters & Robert Stewart
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► In preparation for this Special Issue, MCLR+ hosted a two-part workshop, live streamed on YouTube, on Sept. 13 & 21, 2024. The videos and audios of these events are available here: [Pt. 1 Event Page | Video | Podcast] [Pt. 2 Event Page | Video | Podcast]
► For an international & interdisciplinary collection of supplemental primary and secondary materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources: “Economic & Poverty Sanctions.”
► Looking for other Modern Criminal Law Review issues? Here they are.
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