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“It's like a reverse Robin Hood—We all know they can't pay”: How court actors navigate the logics of monetary sanctions

  • Sarah Shannon
    ,
  • Alexes Harris
    ,
  • Tyler Smith
    ,
  • Mary Pattillo
    ,
  • Karin Martin
    ,
  • Ilya Slavinski
  • University of Georgia
    ,
  • University of Washington
    ,
  • Northwestern University
    ,
  • Dominican University New York
    ,
  • University of Maryland, College Park
    ,
  • California State University, San Bernardino
Research Output:
Contribution to journal
Article
 Peer-review

Open access

Abstract

Monetary sanctions (also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs) are the most common form of state sanction for criminal convictions, yet we know little about the logics that court actors use in their implementation. Merging an inhabited institutions perspective with the institutional logics framework, we present evidence from court actors’ accounts of imposing and collecting LFOs to reveal how they navigate the competing penal and fiscal logics of LFO sentencing across eight states. We show that the polyvalent logics underlying LFOs give rise to individual and collective critiques. Amid this discontent, we discern several patterns in how court actors navigate the tensions between coexisting logics and continue their work unabated, including the use of discretion and prioritization of some goals over others. Our analysis demonstrates how court actors make sense of their work within a complex legal field rife with conflicting priorities and how LFO sentencing and collection persist despite the contradictory logics undergirding them. Our theoretical model connecting institutional logics and inhabited institutions frameworks elucidates how decision-making in the criminal legal system operates. Although we specifically examine monetary sanctions, our findings have implications for other contexts in which decision-makers struggle with interpretation, application, and consequence.

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Bibliographic Information

Output type

Research Output:
Contribution to journal
Article
 Peer-review

Original language

American English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 26-57

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Criminology

Publication milestones

  • Published - 21/03/2025

Publication status

Published - 21/03/2025

ISSN

0011-1384

Publication IDs

  • Scopus: 105003026978
  • PubMed: 41346396