IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ays/ispwps/paper1815.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fees and Fines: An Economist’s View of Who Should Pay

Author

Listed:
  • Robert D. Ebel

    (International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State Univeristy)

Abstract

In Bearden v. Georgia (1983), the US Supreme Court found that an indigent defendant cannot be jailed for an inability to pay a fee or fine unless the defendant has “has willfully refused to pay the fine or restitution when he has the resources to pay or has failed to make…efforts to seek employment or borrow money to pay…” However, the Court stopped short of giving clear guidance on the meaning of either ability or willingness to pay (Edelman, 2017). The US Constitution is explicit that that once a person is convicted of a crime the fines imposed shall not be excessive.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert D. Ebel, 2018. "Fees and Fines: An Economist’s View of Who Should Pay," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper1815, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1815
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://icepp.gsu.edu/files/2018/07/paper1815.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1815. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Paul Benson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ispgsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.