by Nedric Miller, LSPC Senior Policy Fellow
For far too long, poverty has carried a price tag in America, and nowhere has that been more painfully obvious than in the legal system, where being poor often means being punished twice: once by the court, and again by the bill that follows. This legislative cycle, LSPC is cosponsoring AB 2428 (C. Rodriguez): An Act to End Poverty Fees, which would eliminate criminal administrative fees that are nearly exclusively assessed on people who cannot afford to pay them.
For generations, low‑income people, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have lived under a system that charges them for every step and every mistake, turning ordinary moments of struggle into financial crises that ripple through families and neighborhoods. It starts with something small, almost forgettable: a traffic ticket, a court appearance. But each of these steps comes with a fee, and for people already fighting to keep the lights on or food on the table, those fees don’t just wound, they destabilize entire lives.
These fines and fees were never truly about public safety, they were about revenue.
As government budgets tightened over the years, states and counties quietly shifted the cost of running courts, jails, and probation departments onto the very people caught inside them. Poor people have become the revenue source for local governments, expected to pay for their own punishment at every turn. Every arrest, every hearing, every day in jail comes with a cost, and even children in juvenile court find price tags placed on their mistakes, bills their parents often have no hope of paying.
And when people couldn’t pay, the punishment didn’t end. It got worse.
A missed payment could mean a suspended driver’s license. No license means no job. No job means no rent. A small fee, maybe $50 or $100, could snowball into homelessness, unemployment, and another encounter with the police. Not because someone committed a new crime, but because they were poor. This is how poverty becomes criminalized, and how a system claiming to deliver justice delivers adversity and punishment instead.
This burden is not shared equally. Black and Latine communities feel these penalties most intensely. They are stopped more often, cited more often, fined more often, and charged more fees than their white counterparts. They are less likely to receive fee waivers and more likely to face harsh consequences when they cannot pay. In some cities, fines and fees make up a significant proportion of the city’s budget, pulled directly from neighborhoods already struggling to survive. It functions like a racialized tax, disguised as justice, draining wealth from communities that have already been denied it for generations. Families absorb the cost, as well as those already carrying the weight of the world.
These fees don’t make communities safer, they don’t reduce crime, and don’t improve public safety. What they do is trap people in a cycle: poverty leads to punishment, punishment leads to deeper poverty, deeper poverty leads to harsher punishment. It becomes a second sentence, long after the first one ends and a shadow that follows people for years.
Today, people are fighting back. The coalition of Debt Free Justice, LSPC and All Of Us Or None are pushing to end these “poverty penalties,” and California’s AB 2428 is part of that growing movement. The bill aims to eliminate abusive fees, erase old debt, and stop charging people for their own punishment. This is a move towards restoring dignity, justice, and basic humanity in a system that has taken too much for too long.
AB 2428 represents a recognition that justice should not depend on the size of someone’s bank account, and that punishment should not come with a lifetime of physical and financial consequences. Ending poverty fees is not just a policy change, it is a statement that no one should be punished for being poor. It is a chance to break the cycle that has trapped families for generations and build a justice system that takes accountability, shows recognition and actually delivers justice. It is a chance to rewrite the rules so that punishment ends when the sentence does.
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