UAB professor looking to make a difference in legal debt for Jefferson County residents selected for award

Peter Jones, Ph.D., associate professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Political Science and Public Administration, was recently named a recipient of the Scholarly Engagement Award by The Associate for Budgeting and Financial Management.

Jones was selected for this award for his work on a report of the fiscal impacts of legal financial obligations for residents in Jefferson County. Jones, in collaboration with the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, worked to identify, implement and evaulate interventions aimed at reducing the harms caused by legal debt.

"In this report, I analyzed the court's fines and fees structure and measured the gap between the amount of money courts assessed and what was ultimately collected," Jones said. "In this process, I found the court collected only 30 percent of what was assessed, and fewer than 25 percent of cases had their LFOs completely paid off."

Jones detailed in the report disparities in assessments across race and gender and outlined elements of the collection system that led to inefficient and inequitable outcomes, including a 30 percent late fee that is added to the original amount due when fees are more than 90 days past due.

Since the submission of his report, Jones has seen a change in court policy for the application of LFOs and a significant reduction in the amounts charged to residents.

"One of the best parts of my job is working with members of the community who are often not well represented in the policy process," Jones said. "I enjoy providing a public finance perspective to system actors who might not otherwise think about how we collect and manage public dollars. I'm proud to have been part of this collaboration and for this work to have led to real change, and I am honored that my peers saw fit to recognize it."

Jones is conducting a pilot project in Jefferson County that will reduce the amounts of fines and fees assessed at sentencing and an ongoing partnership - funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance - that will take the analytical frameworks Jones and his team developed in Jefferson County to five jurisdictions across the country to help them assess their own legal fines and fees methods.