Georgetown Law
Technology Review

This Note discusses a novel, technology-enabled approach to address the issue of people being sent to jail for unpaid court debt in the United States. In 2016, the state of Oklahoma passed a law that makes formerly incarcerated people eligible for a waiver of their outstanding court fees if they comply with all probation requirements and make payments on their court debt for twenty-four consecutive months following release. However, awareness of this mechanism for debt relief is low among debtors, defense attorneys, and judges, and the process to determine eligibility is technical and complicated. This leads to low waiver uptake and high levels of outstanding debt that hold formerly incarcerated people back from building savings and fully ending their entanglement with the criminal legal system.

Our team worked in partnership with Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma to explore the potential of digital tools to increase access to these court debt waivers. First, we demonstrated that it is possible to generate lists of people who are likely eligible for fine and fee waivers. We applied a rule-based algorithm that mimics the statutory requirements for waiver eligibility to a database web scraped from publicly available court records. Drawing on a sample of court records in Oklahoma’s three largest counties over a fifteen-year period, we identified between approximately 218 and 1,381 people who may be eligible for such a waiver today, depending on the construction of the statute accepted in that county. The variation reflects how a construction that accepts twenty-four non-consecutive months of payments increases the eligible population sixfold. This analysis—the first seeking to quantify an eligible client base— suggests that up to 5,500 people statewide may be eligible from this period. Second, our team created an interactive digital tool for legal aid attorneys. The tool synthesizes and summarizes relevant information about a person’s outstanding court fees and waiver eligibility in less than one minute, enabling legal aid attorneys to prepare more motions for relief. Finally, our empirical findings show that reforms expanding eligibility for debt relief could reduce the number of people incarcerated due to unpaid fees and reduce racial disparities in who is eligible for such waivers. This type of sensitivity analysis, which can be performed entirely on publicly available data, should inform future policy on the terms of indigency-based waivers, Clean Slate laws, and efforts to encode legal rules into digital tools.

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