"The Price of Justice in Oregon: Rethinking Court-Ordered Monetary Sanctions" was created by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law and the Portland-based CLEAR Clinic, which provides free legal services to Oregonians.
Courtesy Oregon Justice Resource Center
The Oregon justice system imposes fees, fines and restitution on people found guilty of a wide range of crimes. These different kinds of financial penalties are having a severe and disproportionate impact on people of color, those in low-income neighborhoods and in rural communities, according to a new report called “The Price of Justice in Oregon.” The broad look at jurisdictions all over the state was years in the making and resulted from the combined efforts of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law and the Portland-based CLEAR Clinic, which provides free legal services to Oregonians. We get more details and the report’s policy recommendations from Gus Patel-Tupper with the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon should eliminate fees and fines in its criminal justice system without increasing the use of jail or other punitive sanctions. That’s one of the big recommendations from a report that came out yesterday. It looked at various kinds of monetary sanctions levied by the criminal justice system: fees, fines, and restitution. It found that they bring in little net revenue and can even cause some governments to lose money. What’s more, the report says that by causing psychological and financial hardship, these costs end up creating barriers to societal reentry for people with criminal records. Portlander Gus Patel-Tupper is one of the co-authors of the new report. He is a clinical supervisor in the UC Berkeley School of Law, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Gus Patel-Tupper: Thanks.
Miller: You started your report with the description of the ways that fees and fines worked in Ferguson, Missouri. What did the U.S. Department of Justice find there when it launched a civil rights investigation in the wake of the Michael Brown killing?
Patel-Tupper: The DOJ investigation in Ferguson started in 2015, and they found that it was a combination of the policing practices and the predatory practices of the Ferguson, Missouri Municipal Court that really led to intense racial bias and the fundamental goal of the municipal court in Ferguson, which the DOJ found, was solely to raise revenue. The sort of criminal justice functions of the court were so subsumed to the goal of raising money that that’s all the court existed to do and all that the police were really able to spend time on in Ferguson.
Miller: You start the report with that, but then you note that in Oregon municipal and justice courts don’t appear to be a major site of wealth extraction. So in what ways is Ferguson a helpful way to think about these practices?
Patel-Tupper: Yeah, I’m glad you picked up on the municipal and justice court angle in the report because it’s something that is of special interest to me, and I don’t at all want to leave people with the impression that I think municipal injustice courts are doing things well, necessarily, or a model in Oregon. What we can say about municipal injustice courts is that we really have no idea what’s going on.
This report is based on eight years of data from the Oregon Judicial Department, the state court system in Oregon. And they were able to provide fantastic data and they’ve been really collaborative in answering our questions, super responsive to our follow-ups, not to say that they’re doing everything perfectly either, but I submitted records requests to 176 municipal courts and justice courts and county courts in Oregon, those courts have limited jurisdiction. 76 of them ignored me and only four of them actually provided any meaningful data in response. I don’t want to get too far afield, but we really just at the end of the day have almost no idea what’s going on, what they’re collecting, what they’re assessing, how they’re really impacting people’s lives.
Miller: So let’s turn to what you do have data about. There’s a lot of data, and maybe we can start by having you separate out the different kinds of monetary sanctions that we’re talking about. I mentioned those words. So what’s the difference between a fee, a fine, and restitution?
Patel-Tupper: A fee is effectively a tax. That’s a little bit inflammatory to say, but it’s really like a person who’s involved in a criminal case, a person who’s hauled into court is paying for a thing that the court does. So there are fees for public defenders, you might be charged a fee for every day that you have to wear an electronic monitoring device. There were fees for supervision in Oregon that have been eliminated, but you can effectively be charged a fee for anything. And a fine is a punishment for a crime, so it’s part of a sentence, and then restitution is meant as a direct payment between a person who does harm, a person who commits a crime, and then the victim or the survivor of the crime.
Miller: You write in the report that Oregon has actually been at the forefront of monetary sanction reform in the last five years. So before we get to the changes you’d still like to see, what has already happened, first of all, at the state level?
Patel-Tupper: Oregon has made some changes and I think a lot of those are fantastic and I think they’re a sign that we can make these changes that we’re recommending in the report and that real reform is possible. So I briefly mentioned the state eliminated supervision fees. I also worked on legislation as a law student that passed in 2021 that eliminated juvenile delinquency fees and fines and also waived all associated debt, so eliminated those fees prospectively and retroactively. And then legislation that passed, I believe in 2025, actually limited in some ways the ability of insurance companies, private insurance companies, to collect restitution in criminal cases. So there have been major changes in the last few years.
Miller: That’s all at the state level. What about at the county level? What’s Multnomah County doing in recent years?
Patel-Tupper: Multnomah County actually was kind of the impetus for the state level supervision fee elimination, I believe. And actually we worked with the district attorney in Wasco County, The Dalles, to adopt a policy for the prosecutor’s office there to not seek monetary sanctions that they don’t have to seek, that they’re not required by law to seek, so counties are taking action as well.
Miller: How much do monetary sanctions vary by county? I mean, let’s say if one person were convicted of the same crime in each of Oregon’s 36 counties, how big a difference might there be in this sort of imaginary scenario in terms of how much they would end up having to pay in total?
Patel-Tupper: Well, in the last full year that we have data for, just by way of example, in Jackson County, the average per person total, so that’s southwestern-ish, south central Oregon, the average per person total in monetary sanctions, so if you have a criminal case and you’re assessed monetary sanctions, the average total per person was $3,800. And then in Union County, more towards the northeastern border, the average total for the same year was $783.
So there’s a wide variation. And then, in the OJD data, we also have totals by zip code, and we found that 60% of monetary sanctions total statewide are imposed on people living in only 10% of Oregon zip codes, which vary descriptive statistics, it’s not necessarily something that we can draw like a causal inference from but it’s, I think, an interesting story.
Miller: If you’re looking at county to county variation, how do you explain that level of discrepancy? I guess I’m wondering what’s required under statute or under rules and what’s left up to the discretion of judges or prosecutors?
Patel-Tupper: That is a really interesting question, and there’s not a super clear cut story in our data. What I, as an Oregonian, might be expecting to see looking at the data is either something that kind of tracks the politics or the population, where like in the Willamette Valley is where we’re seeing a lot of fines and fees and restitution imposed because people with higher incomes are living there. Or there’s less imposition because they’re….
Miller: They’re more progressives who say like this is a part of a progressive change to criminal justice policy. But you’re saying you don’t know, you don’t see patterns like that.
Patel-Tupper: You don’t see that at all, and there’s really stark variation across assessment, collection, and waiver of debt, but it is almost, or we couldn’t find any pattern, I don’t wanna say it’s necessarily random, but… And you asked about the difference between law and practice and we do have a lot of laws and rules governing how monetary sanctions are imposed and collected, but a lot of it is also left up to the judges. And some of it does even depend on what sanctions prosecutors are seeking or even how zealously a defense attorney is representing their client, or if the client is willing to negotiate away the right to challenge the restitution in a plea agreement or something like that.
Miller: You mentioned judges there, as part of this report, you interviewed something like a dozen or so judges. What did you hear from them about the way they approach fees and fines and restitution?
Patel-Tupper: Again, a lot of variation. So different judges approach things very differently, different judges have different interpretations of the degree of discretion they have. Some judges, we reproduced some of the conversations that I had with judges saying, when I can waive, I’ll waive, they are trying to impose as little as they can. And some judges were a little bit more interested in actually imposing more in restitution, especially. But yeah, just for me an unsettling amount of variation across courtrooms.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for just the level of monetary sanction debt in Oregon right now?
Patel-Tupper: In our data, which is current through 2024, the Oregon Judicial Department, which again is not the whole picture, but OJD, the state court system, holds about $1.4 billion in debt. And then excluding traffic and parking from that, so the monetary sanctioned at the criminal fees, fines, and restitution, which is really what we’re talking about in the report, is $1.1 billion.
Miller: How much of that debt in general do officials expect to actually collect?
Patel-Tupper: Unclear. In the last few biennia, collections have been decreasing. So, in the 2019 to 2021 biennium, they brought in about $250 million, and then in the most recent biennium for which we have data, they were bringing in about $175 million. But then, we also have information that OJD considers debt uncollectible, virtually uncollectible, practically uncollectible after 5 years, and so how much of the especially older debt they’re actually expecting to bring in I think is uncertain.
Miller: I was struck by one of the details in the report that you say that Oregon has operated as a net loss in terms of collection since 2017. What do you mean by that?
Patel-Tupper: Collection rates for monetary sanctions are low. We have them at about 40% or less for the last few years, and the cost of collecting monetary sanctions is relatively high. We don’t know exactly what it is. We did some of our own calculations to try and estimate a cost of collections, which we go into much more detail about in the report, but what we’re trying to calculate is like the judge time, the prosecutor time, the actual cost of the physical plant of the courthouse for the amount of time that courts are spending, discussing and assessing, figuring out how to assess and collect these monetary sanctions.
So if a person comes in for a probation hearing and 15 minutes of that probation hearing is spent talking about how are you paying your debt, you missed these payments, etc., or the court’s sending out letters trying to collect or something like that. So especially when you consider the IRS spends 30 cents or something to bring in $100 in tax revenue, when you think about having a judge, a bailiff, a prosecutor in court to collect pennies from low-income people who largely can’t afford it, yeah, it seems like a waste to me.
Miller: That’s the public side. What about the private side? What did you hear from people who actually owe this debt? What does this mean for them?
Patel-Tupper: Yeah, so the CLEAR Clinic, which is a free legal services clinic based in Portland, that co-published the report with my clinic at Berkeley and the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the CLEAR Clinic did an incredible survey of almost 700 Oregonians, just asking people about their experiences with monetary sanctions. And again it’s not necessarily scientific and people self-selected and it was just for people who wanted to take the survey, but it found that for 85% of people who responded to the survey, their court debt increased their stress. 66% of people reported increased difficulty with transportation either from missing car payments or other barriers imposed by court debt. 54% had trouble with housing.
And 26% of people actually reported that their court debt made them more likely to commit future crimes.
Miller: So that part is important, I think – everything you said is important there. But, if part of the idea here and maybe the hope of, in particular the fines, not the fees, and probably not the restitution, but of the fines is that this is part of the punishment and this may lead people to be less likely to commit crimes. How do you think about the connection between monetary sanctions and recidivism?
Patel-Tupper: There are a number of studies that find that monetary sanction debt actually increases recidivism, whether simply because it increases the barriers to people re-entering after a criminal conviction or release from custody or something like that. And they’re just less able to participate fully in society and just more likely to commit crime or truly a direct connection where I need $20 to pay the court, so I’m gonna steal $20. And there are a few studies that find a null effect, so find no impact from monetary sanctions on restitution, but there are no studies that find that monetary sanctions actually reduce recidivism or make people less likely to come back into the system.
Miller: To me, there is a big difference between using this money to fund local governments like we were talking about at the beginning in Ferguson, or to fund the criminal justice system, and levying these penalties as a form of punishment or restitution. Do you see moral differences in these different kinds of financial penalties?
Patel-Tupper: That’s an interesting question. I do also just wanna be clear, and I hope that this comes across in the report, but the state court system in Oregon doesn’t get to keep very much at all of the revenue it collects. The money goes back into the state general fund and is used for all kinds of services, which I don’t think really changes the moral calculus for me. I think that the moral problems of collecting this debt and keeping our neighbors from participating fully in society are the deepest harms of the system of monetary sanctions that we operate in Oregon and it doesn’t really matter where the money goes at the end of the day.
Miller: But isn’t part of the idea of the fines that harm is part of the… it’s not a bug, but it’s a feature. Not that policymakers set these up to make it so someone would be more likely to commit a crime again, but it is supposed to hurt financially. I mean, your report says this causes financial or psychological harm.
I guess I do feel like that is a part of the policy, that is its intent. Do you think I’m wrong there?
Patel-Tupper: I think it’s not so clear-cut as that. So Stephanie Davis, who’s a paralegal at the CLEAR Clinic, we had a release event for the report yesterday, and she told a story about Cody Graves, who is a Grand Ronde tribe member, and worked with Stephanie to get $30,000 in fines and fees waived that he had been living with for years, after his release from custody. And he couldn’t get the job that he wanted, he couldn’t volunteer at his kid’s school, his girlfriend wouldn’t marry him because she knew he had all this debt. The reason he couldn’t volunteer at his kid’s school is he couldn’t get his record expunged, and you can’t get your record expunged until you pay off your court debt.
And so Stephanie helped him file a motion to waive the debt. The court signed off on it. He got his debt waived and was able to proceed and remove all of those collateral consequences of his conviction, which is fantastic. But it kind of, for me, raises the question what the point of that was in the first place. And I don’t wanna be in the business of speaking up for harsher punishments, but if courts are gonna impose this debt for a few years and then waive it in a few years, and in the meantime, all that happens is a guy can’t volunteer at his kid’s school, what are we really getting out of it? I don’t know if that really gets at your question.
Miller: It does. Let me turn in the time we have left to the restitution piece, which is, I mean, it’s fascinating, each of these ways to say you have to give us money, they’re different. They serve different purposes, and it’s worth saying, as you point out in the report, which I didn’t realize, is that there’s actually a provision in the Oregon Constitution which requires restitution, meaning again this is money going from the perpetrators of crimes to victims of crimes, broadly.
You say basically that you want this to change, but I’m wondering… And that there should be in a sense a public fund instead, that would go to the victims of crimes. I’m just wondering how do you think about fairness there. Even if the current levels of payment of restitution are low, why should taxpayers be on the hook for monetary harms that a convicted criminal, in the words of the Constitution, are responsible for?
Patel-Tupper: I think there’s a fantastic national advocacy organization called the Alliance for Safety and Justice that has done surveys of crime survivors for a number of years, and one of the things they find consistently is that survivors of crime are really dissatisfied with the monetary restitution process. I don’t pretend to have all the answers to that, but I think when people who have done harm and people who have been harmed, who are very often from the same communities.
If you’re putting a restitution order against mom to pay dad, I think we often think about like a stranger paying another stranger, but that’s fairly often not how a criminal case actually works. But, thinking about the Alliance for Safety and Justice’s research into the dissatisfaction of survivors as well as the very well-documented harms that massive restitution orders can do to the people who are ordered to pay them. Yeah, again, I just kind of wonder, is there a better way, is the current system really serving anyone?
Miller: Gus Patel-Tupper, thanks very much.
Patel-Tupper: Thank you.
Miller: Gus Patel-Tupper is a co-author of this new report. It’s called “The Price of Justice in Oregon.” He is a clinical supervisor at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
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