Low-income Californians struggle to pay high court fines. An online tool tries to change that

California’s traffic fines and fees are among the highest in the country, but an online tool now available in Sacramento Superior Court and at courthouses statewide is easing the burden for low-income Sacramento residents.

People can use the online MyCitations to ask for fee reductions, arrange payment plans or community service, bypassing time-consuming paper requests and court appearances.

“It’s a program that has helped many, many Californians,” Shelley Curran, administrative director of the Judicial Council, said in remarks July 12. Since the 2019 launch, about 177,000 people have filed MyCitations requests to cut their fines by an average of $277 totaling about $49 million in reductions, according to the Judicial Council.

The online tool started as a pilot in 2019 within seven counties’ superior courts. Access expanded to 40 local courts by 2023, before becoming available in all 58 California counties this year. Sacramento and Orange counties were the last to come on board in June.

Californians struggle to pay court debts

For years, advocates have warned of the steep toll of infraction fines and fees on the poorest Californians — those least able to pay fines and accompanying fees. The toll has weighed heavy on Black and brown Californians, who, through targeted policing are disproportionately more likely to be on the receiving end of a ticket or citation. Add the costs of civil assessments — the late fees charged to people who miss their payment due dates or court appearances — and the costs grow higher.

“Fines are supposed to be punishment for violating the law, it has two goals: to punish and deter. (But) the fees are funding government,” said Lisa Foster, co-executive director of Washington, D.C.-based advocacy Fine and Fees Justice Center, and a former director of the Office for Access to Justice at the Department of Justice.

“When we raise taxes through the justice system ... it’s harmful to people and is undermining their financial stability,” she said.

Foster is among the Sacramento and national advocates who cheer the expansion of MyCitations even as they say the state must do more to lessen the burden on the least able to pay. She lauded the MyCitations as innovative and important, saying the tool should be implemented nationwide.

But, the former San Diego Superior Court judge added, the tool’s popularity also exposes the deeper issues of California’s steep fines and fees and the burden placed on financially vulnerable Californians.

“It tells us that the state is bankrupting families to bankroll itself. (MyCitations) reduced fees and fines by $50 million dollars before it went statewide — that’s hundreds of thousands of Californians who were sacrificing for taxes,” Foster said.

The program, Foster said, “is not a solution, but a Band-Aid.”

The ‘cascading impact’ of fines

The burden is not unique to California. A national 2023 Fine and Fees Justice Center report in conjunction with the North Carolina-based Wilson Center for Science and Justice, Debt Sentence: How Fines And Fees Hurt Working Families, found 99% of parents of minors said they had to cut back on at least one essential need due to court debt.

Six in 10 surveyed said they experienced at least one essential hardship in housing, food, employment, health, child care or transportation.

“It’s not an imaginary harm. It’s incredibly harmful and stressful,” said Rebecca Miller, a senior litigant at the Sacramento-based Western Center for Law and Poverty. “We often talk about this. You take a traffic ticket and it forces that to the top of people’s list. You are forcing something that is not rent, not food, and causing stresses and other financial consequences. We constantly create crises in low-income Californians’ lives and create collateral consequences.”

A 2016 report by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area found that Black and Latino Californians were more likely to lose their driver’s licenses due to unpaid tickets then be arrested for driving with suspended licenses.

The report showed the fines’ cascading impact: “Individuals who cannot afford to pay an infraction citation are being arrested, jailed and prosecuted, and are losing their licenses and their livelihoods,” the report read.

That same year, the state’s Judicial Council examined how high fines and fees impacted low-income court users.

California courts officials found the fines and fees handed down to Californians without the ability to pay them had created a “debtor’s prison,” in one court official’s words, trapping many under piles of debt.

Lawmakers and the trial courts, responded by removing license suspensions from the list of consequences of unpaid infractions and by making it easier for financially challenged Californians to whittle down their fines and fees. In 2022, three years after the MyCitations launch, a law required courts to discharge debt from all civil assessments imposed before July 2022, and reduced the maximum civil assessment fee from $300 to $100.

“We got hooked on using fines, fees and assessments as a way to fund vital government services,” Martin Hoshino, then the Judicial Council’s administrative director, said in 2019 on MyCitations’ debut. Hoshino had served on a national task force to reform the practice.

“We’ve gotten to a point of stacking these fines and fees on top of people, and we’ve created nothing short of a debtor’s prison,” Hoshino said. “That should not be happening. This tool will help us address that.”

Tori Larett, a staff attorney with the Homeless Advocacy Clinic at University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento who represents people in Sacramento’s traffic courts co-wrote the 2016 report while at the Lawyers Committee.

“The expansion of MyCitations is a good step forward for the traffic courts,” Larett said. “Frankly, it has made it more simple. California realizes the fines are too onerous.”

“The collateral consequences have actually not gone away — the fees are still high to begin with,” Larett added. “Tickets tend to stack up for people and there are still more fees to process. The risk to employment is just huge. You have a license suspended, you can’t get to community services. There are few practicable options.”

But the new tool has simplified the process to seek a break on fees and many judges are granting the reductions, the Judicial Council said.

In Sacramento County prior to MyCitations going live, people could only submit an ability-to-pay application to Sacramento Superior Court in person or by mail.

In 2023, 83 percent of ability-to-pay requests received via MyCitations were approved by the courts for a reduction, according to the Judicial Council. Last year, nearly half — 49% — of those who submitted requests to the MyCitations tool reported receiving some type of public benefit and 89% reported incomes at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level.

All California traffic and infraction tickets now have information about the MyCitations tool and how to access it.

The Judicial Council has also posted a demonstration on YouTube.

A February report to the state legislature laid out other benefits: those able to have their fines reduced were more likely to repay the full amount of the fines as the fine amounts decreased.

“California traffic laws and penalties have outdated consequences for not being able to resolve (violations),” said Miller, of the Western Center for Law and Poverty. “When you make tickets more affordable, people pay them. The majority of people want to do the right thing.”