Crime is declining across major categories in the United States. Violent crime dropped significantly in 2023, with homicides falling at a double-digit rate. Urban crime indicators have trended downward year-over-year into 2024. The standard explanations — better policing, demographic shifts, economic cycles — are not adequate to account for the pattern. A more underexamined factor: the dismantling of the court fee-extraction model that gave the justice system a financial stake in generating and extending cases. Remove the incentive to keep people in the system, and the system stops needing them there. You cannot call that soft on crime. It is just what happens when you stop paying courts to process people.
For years, the standard story about crime in America has been a reactive one. Crime goes up: blame policy failure, social breakdown, inadequate policing. Crime goes down: credit policing strategy, demographic change, or economic improvement. The explanatory framework always starts with crime as the independent variable, and the system as the thing responding to it.
Something different has been happening underneath that narrative. Crime is declining. And at least part of the reason why may have nothing to do with what the system is doing about crime, and everything to do with what the system has stopped doing to people.
What the Data Actually Shows
The FBI’s 2023 crime data documented a significant drop in violent crime nationally, with homicides declining at a double-digit rate — one of the sharpest year-over-year drops in recent memory. The Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks urban crime indicators with granular city-level data, has continued to document year-over-year decreases across multiple offense categories into 2024. Property crime trends are stabilizing or declining across multiple regions. This is not a single-source finding or a short-term fluctuation. The pattern is consistent across data sources, geographies, and offense types.
The explanations offered by standard commentators have been predictable. Better policing. Post-pandemic normalization. Economic recovery reducing economic-pressure crime. Demographic aging of the population. Each of these factors is plausible and likely contributes something. None of them, alone or in combination, fully accounts for the pattern. And all of them treat the justice system as a passive responder — a thermostat reacting to social temperature rather than an active participant in shaping it.
The Financial Architecture of the Justice System
For decades, local courts, probation departments, and supervision agencies have operated with embedded financial incentives tied directly to case volume and person-processing. The mechanisms have been varied but consistent in their effect.
Probation supervision fees billed to people under court supervision — sometimes monthly, sometimes per contact, sometimes regardless of employment status or ability to pay. Court costs assessed at filing, at conviction, and at every subsequent hearing. Late payment penalties that compound on people who cannot pay the underlying fees, generating new debt on top of existing debt. Pay-to-stay incarceration fees charged to people who are detained, billing them for the cost of their own imprisonment. And over all of it, a system in which courts, counties, and municipalities received a portion of what was collected — creating a direct revenue line from case processing to local government budgets.
When a court generates revenue by processing people, it develops an institutional financial interest in having people to process. This does not require individual corruption. It does not require any officer or judge to consciously choose extraction over justice. It requires only that the incentive structure be in place, quietly shaping the aggregate behavior of a system toward more charges, longer supervision, escalated low-level cases, and slower exits. Incentives produce behavior. That is what incentives do.
The Ferguson, Missouri report produced by the Department of Justice in 2015 documented this dynamic in stark terms for one municipality. But Ferguson was not an anomaly. It was a documented example of a structure that existed, in varying degrees of intensity, across thousands of jurisdictions. Courts that relied on fee revenue to fund operations. Probation departments that billed supervisees. Jails that charged for meals and phone calls. The financial architecture of the justice system was not incidentally connected to its behavior. It shaped it.
What Reform Actually Looked Like
The reform movement that has been dismantling this structure is not new, but it has accelerated significantly since 2019, driven by a convergence of advocacy, litigation, and legislative action that produced results in states across the political spectrum.
Beginning with AB 1869 in 2020 and expanding through subsequent legislation, California eliminated a substantial range of administrative fees tied to the justice system — including fees for public defenders, probation supervision, electronic monitoring, and various court-imposed costs. The state also eliminated existing debt tied to those fees. This was not a reduction. It was an elimination of the revenue model.
New York reduced mandatory surcharges on criminal convictions, including eliminating surcharges for violations and reducing them for misdemeanors and felonies. Combined with other fee reforms, the change reduced the financial burden placed on people convicted of lower-level offenses and reduced the revenue incentive for prosecution of those cases.
Michigan’s driver responsibility fee program, which assessed additional fees on drivers with certain violations regardless of income, faced sustained advocacy pressure and was ultimately repealed. Court cost structures — the fees assessed at each stage of criminal proceedings — have continued to face scrutiny. The Michigan Supreme Court has grappled with the limits of what can be imposed as “costs” without constituting punishment.
The Mechanism: What Changes When the Financial Incentive Goes Away
The argument here is not that eliminating fines and fees directly causes crime to drop. It is more structural than that, and more subtle.
When courts are no longer financially tethered to case volume, several things shift. The incentive to overcharge a case — to stack charges, to add enhancements, to escalate a low-level matter into something that generates more revenue — weakens. The incentive to extend supervision — to keep someone on probation longer, to add conditions that generate fee revenue, to revoke for technical violations rather than working through them — weakens. The institutional appetite for processing low-level cases at all weakens, because the financial return that once justified that processing is no longer available.
None of this requires any individual officer or judge to make a different decision. It works at the level of institutional incentives. Over time, those institutional incentives shape what cases get filed, how they get charged, how long people stay in the system, and how often people cycle back into it. Remove the incentive structure, and you change the behavior of the system. Not immediately, and not completely. But over time, in ways that accumulate in the data.
Overcharging: When each count generates revenue, the financial incentive favors more charges, not fewer. Charging decisions made in a revenue-neutral environment look different.
Extended supervision: When supervision generates monthly fee revenue, the incentive favors longer probation terms, more conditions, and revocation for technical violations that keep the revenue stream flowing.
Low-level case escalation: When courts generate revenue by processing misdemeanors and citations, there is no institutional pressure to divert those cases or decline to file them. The opposite pressure exists.
Debt-driven reincarceration: When unpaid fines and fees trigger warrants, license suspension, and revocation, the debt itself becomes a mechanism for returning people to the system — generating new cases from old ones.
The Counterargument Worth Engaging
The standard objection to this analysis is that fines and fees generate a small fraction of court budgets, and that their elimination could not plausibly account for systemwide behavioral change. That objection underestimates how institutional incentives work. Revenue need not be large in absolute terms to shape behavior meaningfully. A probation department that depends on supervision fees for 15% of its operating budget has a 15% financial interest in keeping its caseload at current levels or growing it. That interest does not dominate every decision, but it colors the margins of many of them. The marginal decision — to revoke or not, to file or divert, to add a condition or not — is where incentive structures do their work.
The more compelling objection is that the correlation between fee reform and crime decline is not established with enough rigor to support causal claims. That objection is correct. This analysis does not claim a proven causal relationship. It claims that an underexamined structural factor — the removal of institutional financial incentives for case generation — is plausibly a contributing mechanism in the observed decline, and that it deserves examination rather than dismissal. The alternative — treating the justice system as purely reactive to exogenous crime trends while ignoring its internal economic architecture — is not more rigorous. It is less honest.
What the Data Cannot See
Crime data measures what the system counts. What it cannot measure is the case that was not filed, the charge that was not added, the probation violation that was worked through rather than revoked, the low-level matter that was diverted before it became a case. These are the outcomes that do not appear in crime statistics because they never become criminal events — but they are the outcomes that change when institutional incentives change.
If fewer people are cycling through the system because the system has less institutional reason to process them, that reduction in processing does not show up as a reduction in crime. It shows up as nothing. Which is exactly what a system that has stopped generating cases looks like from the outside.
The Assumption This Challenges
The justice system is almost universally discussed as a reactive institution. Crime happens; the system responds. Recidivism increases; the system adapts. Trends shift; policy follows. This framing obscures a structural reality that the fines and fees debate surfaces clearly: parts of the justice system have been economically driven for a long time. They have had financial interests in the behavior they were nominally designed to address. They have generated cases as well as responded to them.
Removing the financial incentive does not make the system soft. It makes it, for the first time in many jurisdictions, financially indifferent to whether it processes someone or not. And financial indifference — in a system that was previously financially motivated — produces less processing. Less processing produces fewer people cycling through the system. Fewer people cycling through the system reduces the conditions that produce recidivism.
You cannot call that soft on crime. Because it is just what happens when systems stop feeding themselves.
What Happens Next?
If Michigan moves toward a fully state-funded court model, expect a structural shift in how justice is applied. Right now, outcomes vary wildly county to county. Resource constraints, local funding pressures, and fragmented oversight create uneven charging and prosecution patterns, especially in smaller jurisdictions. A centralized funding model changes that entirely.
Why? Because funding equates to leverage. Legislative priorities are ultimately enforced through allocation decisions and state-level oversight tightens through State Court Administrative Office mechanisms. The likely result becomes more uniform charging decisions across counties, less tolerance for outlier practices driven by local pressures, and greater alignment between policy intent and courtroom outcomes.
Of course, this cuts both ways. Standardization can reduce arbitrary disparities, but it can potentially concentrate power at the top.
Either way, one thing is clear: the current lopsided system, where outcomes can depend heavily on geography, becomes harder to sustain when funding and oversight are no longer local. That’s the shift entirely.
