Abstract
In this Article, I apply an expanded concept of education carcerality to identify and analyze a largely unexamined modality of punitive economic governance—intra-system educational fines and fees. Distinguished from other forms of childhood financial sanctions, including the criminalization of ordinary child and adolescent behavior in schools through the use of municipal fines and fees, these carceral-penal practices are exclusively defined, imposed, and collected within school systems themselves. Drawing on original data from 101 publicly available policies governing the two largest school districts by student population in each state and the District of Columbia, this Article contributes to the literature with three principal findings. First, that intra-system educational fines and fees are nearly ubiquitous across jurisdictions. Second, these economic obligations give rise to compounding non-economic punishments when students and families are unable to pay, including the withholding of diplomas, grades, and transcripts. Third, existing protective policy provisions are highly variant, unevenly designed, and no districts examined provide categorical waivers. These findings affirm a central claim that this form of fines and fees constitute a pervasive and unregulated system of economic education carcerality and underscore the pressing need for critical praxis among economic justice, education law, and youth justice advocates and scholars to contest and dismantle the operation of institutionalized carceral economic conditions within public schools.
Recommended Citation
Thalia González, Fines, Fees, and the Carceral Economic Conditions of Public Education, 84 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online 1 (2026), https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr-online/vol84/iss1/1
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Education Economics Commons, Education Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Public Interest Commons, Social Welfare Law Commons