Law Commons^™

Mercenary Criminal Justice, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

To some degree, money has always figured in criminal justice. Early on, private enforcers of the criminal law received payments for their work. Remuneration played a less explicit but still prominent role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as public actors carried out the work of criminal justice. Today, amid significant budget pressures brought on by the Great Recession and the costs of running the nation’s massive criminal justice apparatus, courts and other system actors rely heavily on a growing number of legal financial obligations (“LFOs”) as revenue sources. When this happens, courts and other system actors become mercenaries, in …