The Brennan Center for Justice’s Revenue Over Public Safety documents what structural analysis of the American criminal justice system demonstrates: it is not purely a public safety apparatus. It is also a revenue-generation system — one in which fines, fees, civil asset forfeiture, privatized probation, and the correctional bed market extract money from the poorest and most vulnerable people at every stage of the legal process. In some jurisdictions documented by the report, fines and forfeitures account for more than 20 percent of government revenue. That financial dependency warps enforcement decisions, prosecution priorities, and incarceration patterns in ways that systematically harm the communities the system claims to protect.
The Report: What the Brennan Center Found
The Brennan Center for Justice’s Revenue Over Public Safety report examines how financial incentives have become embedded in the operation of the American criminal justice system at the local, state, and federal levels. The report’s core finding is that criminal justice agencies are not evaluated on — and are often not structured to pursue — the outcomes they publicly claim as their purpose. They are, in significant part, revenue-generation systems, and that revenue motive operates in direct tension with fairness, rehabilitation, and genuine public safety.
The report documents how people caught in the criminal legal system are systematically required to fund their own processing through fines, fees, and surcharges at every stage: when arrested, when prosecuted, when incarcerated, when placed on probation or parole, and when attempting to re-enter society. These costs fall most heavily on the people least able to pay them — and for the poorest defendants, unpaid fees generate further legal consequences that extend system contact indefinitely, often long past any relationship to the original offense. The Brennan Center connects this mechanism directly to the documented phenomenon of debt-based incarceration, in which people are jailed not for the underlying offense but for failing to pay the fees associated with it.
In some jurisdictions, fines and forfeitures from criminal enforcement activity account for more than 20 percent of government revenue, according to the Brennan Center. This financial dependency transforms law enforcement from a public safety function into a revenue-generation activity. The agency that depends on fine and forfeiture income to fund its operations has a structural incentive to generate that income regardless of whether each individual enforcement action serves a public safety purpose. The Brennan Center documents how this incentive structure has warped enforcement priorities in jurisdictions across the United States, driving activity toward revenue-generating stops and seizures rather than community-protective outcomes.
Counties and private firms have expanded jail capacity specifically to generate revenue through intergovernmental bed rental contracts. The Brennan Center documents how federal immigration detention policy in particular has driven construction of new detention facilities not in response to public safety need but in response to contract opportunity. The result is incarceration capacity that creates its own demand — a system in which the availability of revenue from bed contracts incentivizes both the construction of facilities and the policies that fill them, independent of any public safety analysis of whether that incarceration serves a legitimate purpose.
The report documents that law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies are commonly evaluated on volume metrics — arrests made, convictions obtained, assets seized — rather than on whether the outcomes produced are fair, rehabilitative, or genuinely oriented toward public safety. These incentives systematically push enforcement activity toward easy targets: poor people, people of color, and minor offenses that generate countable outcomes with minimal investigative investment. The result is a documented reinforcement of racial and economic inequality through the structure of professional incentives, not solely through individual bias.
The Brennan Center argues that reform efforts focused on individual extraction mechanisms — reducing specific fines, limiting particular forfeiture practices, or capping probation fees — will not produce structural change as long as the underlying revenue dependency remains. Agencies that depend on criminal justice revenue to fund operations will shift to available revenue streams when individual streams are constrained. Structural reform requires eliminating the dependency itself: removing criminal justice revenue from government operating budgets and replacing it with direct appropriations that do not create enforcement-for-revenue incentives. Without that structural change, the financial machinery sustaining mass incarceration will continue to operate through whatever mechanisms remain available to it.
Sources
Rita Williams, When Money Drives Justice: The Dangerous Incentives Warping Our Legal System, Clutch Justice (July 1, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/07/01/when-money-drives-justice/.
Williams, R. (2025, July 1). When money drives justice: The dangerous incentives warping our legal system. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/07/01/when-money-drives-justice/
Williams, Rita. “When Money Drives Justice: The Dangerous Incentives Warping Our Legal System.” Clutch Justice, 1 July 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/07/01/when-money-drives-justice/.
Williams, Rita. “When Money Drives Justice: The Dangerous Incentives Warping Our Legal System.” Clutch Justice, July 1, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/07/01/when-money-drives-justice/.
