Louisiana’s local governments take in $31.49 per capita annually from fines and fees to fund courts and other public agencies, representing the seventh highest fee dependence among the 50 states and raising red flags among public policy experts.
The data comes from a new analysis by the Reason Foundation and is based on 2020 data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances. When police agencies and courts are overly dependent on fines and fees for their revenues, the result can be a distortion of such agencies’ responsibilities to promote justice, the Reason report states.
“When incentives are misaligned, police departments and court systems become more concerned with taxation by citation than carrying out their core functions,” the study says. “Such conflicts of interest can undermine the legitimacy of the criminal justice system.”
The issue of Louisiana local governments being too dependent on fines and fees is also a concern of the New Orleans-based Pelican Institute.
"The funding for Louisiana’s justice system needs a major overhaul,” Pelican’s CEO, Daniel Erspamer, said in an email to the Louisiana Record. “Our system is too dependent on unreliable fines and fees. This structure creates perverse government incentives and hides the true cost of the system from taxpayers.”
Although state lawmakers recently passed transparency measures, Louisiana still lacks a full picture of how its justice system functions, according to Erspamer. In addition, it’s unclear what resources courts and local governments need to efficiently improve public safety, he said.
“We just keep issuing fees and fines on people within the system to keep it all running,” Erspamer said. “The Legislature should fund our courts. It shouldn't be funded by an arbitrary collection process from citizens in the system."
The data shows that in about 25 Louisiana cities, dependence on fees and fines for revenues exceeds 50%.
The Reason Foundation report makes a number of recommendations about such funding methods, including the elimination of user fees and poverty penalties, funding courts solely through state general funds, scaling fines on a person’s ability to pay, offering alternatives to monetary sanctions, and ending all fines and fees within the juvenile justice system.