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In February, Todd Sidesinger left the hospital after doctors placed two stents in his heart to address heart failure.
Three days later, police arrested him on warrants related to roughly $1,500 in unpaid court debt dating back more than a decade. Less than 48 hours after arriving at the county prison in York, Pennsylvania, Sidesinger was dead.
His family alleges jail medical staff ignored repeated signs that he was in cardiac distress, and allowed Sidesinger’s defibrillator vest — which can shock the heart back to a normal rhythm when it detects a life-threatening arrhythmia — to go uncharged. Jail staff has denied any wrongdoing.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, or The Marshall Project in general, you’re probably familiar with the dangers of inadequate medical care behind bars. But as reported by The Appeal last month, Sidesinger’s death is also a grim reminder that “unaware of court debts — or unable to pay them — thousands of people are incarcerated in dangerous jails where their health, safety, and lives are at risk.”
Most people who owe legal debts never experience anything as tragic or immediate as Sidesinger did. The consequences are more often cumulative and slow-moving, criminal justice reform advocacy groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Fines and Fees Justice Center note.
There is the money itself, siphoned away from rent, groceries or medical care. Then there are payment plans that can keep people returning to court for months or years. If a person misses a payment or a court hearing, those missteps can escalate into an outstanding warrant or jail time. In some states, unpaid court debt can also cost someone their driver’s license, a punishment that can make it harder to get to work, earn money and pay the debt.
These costs include fines as punishment for crime, mandatory court fees, probation and supervision fees, public defender reimbursement and a range of seemingly random administrative charges. Sidesinger, for example, was charged for “automation,” “filing of miscellaneous papers” and a “constable fee.”
These fines and fees are often grouped under the term “legal financial obligations,” or LFOs, and add up quickly at scale. An analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that courts in just 24 states assessed nearly $14 billion in LFOs between 2018 and 2022, with rural communities bearing a disproportionate share of the burden.
In rural areas, the consequences of court debt compound quickly — particularly the suspension of driver's licenses in places where public transportation is sparse or nonexistent, and things are generally more geographically dispersed. Pew found that “low-income drivers in rural areas have some of the highest suspension rates in the country.”
But cities are hardly exempt from the burdens of LFOs. In Philadelphia, roughly 100 miles east of where Sidesinger died, a recent academic study looked at financial punishment from a different vantage point — not what it does to one person, but what it looks like when thousands of individual debts are mapped across a city.
Researchers analyzed nearly 200,000 felony cases between 2010 and 2020 and found that LFOs were heavily concentrated in poorer, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia.
This is not a surprising finding on its face. These neighborhoods tend to face more aggressive policing and higher reported rates of violent crime, both of which can drive up contact with the criminal justice system and, by extension, fines and fees. But if court-imposed financial penalties leave whole neighborhoods poorer and less economically stable, the researchers argue, then they might have the opposite effect of one of their apparent purposes: deterring crime. Instead, researchers suggest LFOs “may inadvertently replicate concentrated disadvantage,” thereby “further entrenching neighborhoods in cycles of poverty and justice involvement.”
In Alabama, researchers found another reason to question whether court debt accomplished its stated goals, this time from the point of view of the county coffers. A June report found that counties that impose higher criminal court fees also tended to have larger jail populations. Every additional $100 in fees assessed per case was associated with roughly 34 additional jail detentions per 100,000 residents; the study could not determine whether the fees themselves caused the increase.
The implication is striking because detaining someone in jail is expensive. If higher court fees ultimately lead to more detention, a policy meant to help fund the system may also increase one of its highest costs.
The report concluded that “the anticipated revenue gain from fee increases should be weighed against the costs of increased detention, as well as the social costs of assessing debt on low-wealth residents and families who may struggle to pay.”
In recent years, several states have come to similar conclusions. According to Pew, since 2017, at least 25 states, including Oklahoma, New Mexico and Ohio, have made legislative moves away from reliance on or enforcement of court debt, often citing the costs associated with enforcement and the counterproductive nature of suspending driver's licenses for non-payment.
But much of the momentum away from fines and fees came during a period of unprecedented flexibility in local budgets, fed largely by pandemic-era federal support. That money has now dried up, tax revenue growth is underperforming compared to long-term trends, and federal budget cuts are now poised to push billions of dollars of federal costs onto local governments, according to an analysis by the National Association of Counties, a non-partisan organization that advocates on behalf of county governments.
Analysts with Pew warn that these underlying budgetary realities may prevent additional states from pursuing LFO reforms, and that some jurisdictions may look to add or increase fines and fees to try to meet budget shortfalls.
