2023 Year-End Update
Published on December 5, 2023 by Liam Grace-Flood
Dear all,
We are reaching out on behalf of the Fines and Fees Freedom Fund to provide a year-end update on the debt relief and advocacy made possible by your support.
Because you have supported our work - by sharing your insights, experience, money, or moral support - together, we have been able to cancel or avert nearly 50 warrants for arrest, helping as many people avoid going to jail for inability to pay fines or fees.
Through our Texas pilot, we paid seven people’s fines and fees, kept six people out of jail, and waived more than $2,000 in debt, and this year, we have built on these successes. In addition to directly paying off court debt to keep people out of jail, we have leveraged the legal system and technology to scale our work, embracing our dual mission to both support people who need us now and to advocate for a better future. Here’s what that looks like:
- We partnered with Oklahoma City University Law School to develop the state’s first-ever fines and fees relief clinic. Those students, working in conjunction with passionate attorneys at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma City, have significantly expanded access to criminal debt legal assistance, especially for those in rural areas. So far, they have canceled or averted roughly 40 warrants for arrest, helping as many people clear $100K in fines and fees.
- We also collaborated with public policy and computer science graduate students at the Harvard Kennedy School to develop assistive digital tools for public defenders and pro se litigants in Oklahoma. The first of these tools identifies and contacts individuals who are eligible for criminal debt waiver on the basis of time they have served in prison. The second of these tools will generate the documents that a pro se litigant needs to persuade a judge to grant a debt waiver on the basis of the litigant’s inability to pay. These tools are the first of their kind, and hold immense promise to increase the capacity of legal aid services. Our legal aid partner explained that the Excel spreadsheet he has been using to do this work to date “does half of this, a quarter as well, and said that the tools “reduce ten steps into one.”
- Lastly, our model has been getting recognition and support from funders outside of the legal services space. This year, the Fines and Fees Freedom Fund received the Manolo Sanchez Prize, a $25,000 prize awarded to a startup working to improve the financial health of the financially underserved. An article we wrote about our technology tools won first place in the Georgetown Law Technology Review writing competition and is being published in a forthcoming issue.
Through this work, we are refining our approach to balancing serving short-term needs of people who are affected by fines and fees debt with initiatives that advance our longer-term goal of minimizing the amount of debt created by the system in the first place. For example, in partnership with a local foundation, we are building an evidentiary base to make the case for permanent, public funding for additional legal aid attorneys working on criminal debt relief. We plan to continue refining this model through conversations, pilots, and advocacy work, remaining centered on the needs and desires of the communities we serve.
We are still just beginning. If you would like to further support our work to end poverty-based incarceration, please feel free to donate, to share this letter with your friends or colleagues who might care about this cause, or to reach out to us if you’d like to be supportive in another way.
We will look forward to hearing from you, and to sharing future updates.
Thank you again,
The Fines and Fees Freedom Fund team
Alejandra C. Uría, Caela Murphy, Elena Sokoloski, Liam Grace-Flood, Sean Norick Long
Kemela David
Posted on December 6, 2023
Kemela David J.D.