The influence of legal financial obligations (LFOs) on probation violations: does type of LFO matter?

Community corrections is commonly proposed as one avenue to reduce incarceration rates. Shifting punishment from correctional facilities to probation, parole, and other non-custodial sanctions is one potential – but not foolproof – method of decarceration. In this paper, we contribute another data point to an increasingly significant threat to the promise of community corrections as a true alternative to incarceration: legal financial obligations (LFOs) incurred through court processing and, uniquely for community corrections, the punishment itself. We analyze how LFOs correlate with supervision violation hearings, the formal rule infractions initiated by probation officers that can be the first in a series of escalating sanctions that, ultimately, can result in incarceration. Using an administrative dataset of cases sentenced to probation in two Pennsylvania counties, we explore associations across assessment types, assessment amounts, and counties featuring distinct policy contexts to identify the specific circumstances in which LFOs can initiate these possible backchannels to confinement. We advance the literature by revealing that LFOs specifically incurred by community corrections sentences (as well as restitution) are positively and consistently linked with the likelihood of a probation violation hearing, suggesting that LFOs and their enforcement may complicate the goal of reducing incarceration through community corrections.