A study released earlier this month found that counties that increase criminal fines and fees also see increases in their jail populations.

The study, published by the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA), found that for every additional $100 a county assessed in cumulative criminal court fees, an additional 34 people per 100,000 population were incarcerated.

The study, reviewing data from all 67 counties in the state between 2011 and 2025, found that counties that increased fees by 1% saw a 1.75% increase in detention rates in their respective jails. Authors suggested “that court fee policy changes have measurable but limited impacts on overall jail detentions, and that larger fee increases produce larger effects.”

“It should really give policymakers pause as they think about the efficacy of using local fees to recoup costs for any local project,” said Leah Nelson, a senior research associate with PARCA, who worked on the study with MDRC, a nonpartisan social policy research organization based in New York City, in an interview on Monday.

Authors said that the study did not find that levying additional criminal fines and fees causes more people to be detained, only that a correlation exists between the two.

But the study provides another data point about the adverse impact of using fines and fees, particularly in the criminal legal system, to generate revenue to pay for services….

…. Local governments may also struggle to collect all of the fines and fees that are imposed. Nelson and MDRC published another study in November that focused on residents in Jefferson County, which found that about 42% of people do not pay anything toward their court-imposed fines and fees….

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