Findings

The results of our multi-state analysis of debt imprisonment.

Traffic courts try millions of low-level cases every year. For many people, the result of a traffic case is, at worst, adding points to their driving record and paying fine. However, for a large but often unnoticed group of people, the outcome of a traffic case is time in jail.

These individuals are jailed for failing to pay fines, fees, court costs, and other monetary penalties — what are often termed "legal financial obligations" or "court debts." Imprisonment for failing to pay court debts has not been tracked, at least not in any systematic way. The Stanford Debtors' Prisons Project, a collaboration between the Stanford Computational Policy Lab and the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, has been collecting records of jail bookings and failure to pay warrants across the country. We have collected and standardized records of more than 4 million jail bookings and almost 3 million court cases.

The process has been marked by difficulties, from data kept only in PDFs or on paper, to the denial or outright disregard of hundreds of public records requests by local agencies. Many jails and law enforcement agencies do not record when an individual has been jailed for failure to pay in any way, or use idiosyncratic or inconsistent recording practices.

Data from 64 county jails in Texas and 27 in Wisconsin, along with hundreds of thousands of failure to pay warrants in Oklahoma allow us to rigorously analyze some aspects of debt imprisonment. We find that the practice is widespread, affecting at least tens of thousands of people per year, with significant consequences for people caught up in it.

You can explore our results on this site, along with a tutorial and the raw data data to help you to reproduce the analyses yourself. See our paper for more information.

Per Capita Booking Rates

The most fundamental questions about debt imprisonment is, how often does it happen? Looking at jail booking data from Texas and Wisconsin can give an order-of-magnitude understanding of how many people are likely jailed each year for failure to pay court debts. The data show that for every million residents in the counties we examined, around 1,500 people per year were jailed for failing to pay court debts. This rate is higher than the per capita arrest rate for burglary, shown in red. We caution that counties that did not provide us with data likely differ from those that did, but if these rates hold more broadly, we would expect on the order of 8,000 bookings for failure to pay only each year in Wisconsin, and 38,000 bookings for failure to pay only each year in Texas.

Length of Stay

In addition to the financial burden of paying off fines, fees, and other monetary penalties, court debtors who are actually jailed face the additional burden of the time they must spend incarcerated. We find that most court debtors spend a day to a few days in jail — the median length of stay is one day. However, a substantial portion of court debtors spend days or even weeks in jail for failing to pay cout debts. The average stay in Texas is 2.1 days, and in Wisconsin, court debtors spend an average of 6.2 days in prison.

Fines

While fine amounts generally aren't available for people for people in Texas and Wisconsin, records of whose jailings we have, we can look at data on court cases in the state of Oklahoma to get a sense of how much court debtors' are being asked to pay. The data show that in cases where failure to pay warrants are issued, the amount of unpaid traffic debt is typically only a few hundred to a little over a thousand dollars. In traffic-related cases — the case type in which failure to pay warrants are most frequently issued — total costs are on average $483. Fine and fee totals are higher in more serious cases: $1599 in criminal misdemeanor cases, and $3706 in criminal felony cases.

Underlying Charges

While about 22% of the bookings in Texas and Wisconsin don't record the underlying offense, those that do indicate that the overwhelming majority of failure-to-pay bookings are for petty and non-criminal offenses. Out of all the bookings we examined that do record what the booked individual failed to pay, 64% were for traffic offenses, like speeding, driving without liability insurance, and driving without a seatbelt. While no other single category of offense showed up in as many failure-to-pay bookings, the remainder was made up almost entirely of municipal ordinance and other low-level violations, such as public intoxication (7%), possession of marijuana (5%), petty theft (4%), disorderly conduct (1.7%), and truancy (1.7%).