The Ticket Machine

Buzzfeed
By: Alex Cambell & Kendall Taggart
Published: January 20, 2016
Read the original article

In 2012, the eight officer traffic unit of Port Arthur, Texas, a town of only 55,000 collected $2.1 million in fines.  This revenue bonanza however, came at a significant cost to residents.  From 2009 to 2011 over 1,500 people, about 2.7 percent of the town's population, many of who were poor and seventy-five peercent of who were Black, had been locked up for failure to pay their traffic fines.  Judith Greene is quoted in this Buzzfeed article discussing the use of day fines as a possible solution to this problem.

Related Publication

JS Publication March 16, 2016

Day Fines & The Fare Probation Experiment

This article by Susan Tucker and Judith Greene on the Maricopa County day fines program was first published in 1999 (The Justice System Journal Vol. 21 No. 1, 1999).  Recently, there has been growing interest in day fines from the media, the US Department of Justice, criminal justice reform advocates and academics as a consequence of events in Ferguson Missouri.