“A lot of our criminal system takes place off the radar, in places we don’t pay enough attention to.”
Largely neglected by reformers and researchers, municipal courts hear millions of cases each year and leave a mark on the lives of thousands of people across the country.
When they operate within the status quo, these local courts can leave people with overwhelming fines and even jail time in response to low-level offenses. But they also have the potential to deliver justice in ways that are more responsive to the needs of local communities.
Read on for a conversation with Professor Alexandra Natapoff of Harvard Law School on the far-reaching impacts of these often overlooked courts.
When we think about the scale of the criminal legal system, municipal courts are the lowest tier—the bottom of the pyramid, so to speak. Why is it so important that we pay attention to them?
We’ve underestimated what a central role municipal courts play in our legal system and in local governance. There are many reasons why these courts are important, but the obvious one is scale. There are about 7,500 municipal courts nationwide. That’s more than there are state trial courts. They sometimes look very small and local, but in the aggregate, they are enormously influential.
What sets these courts apart from ordinary criminal courts?
It’s tricky to generalize, because municipal courts are so diverse. In some ways, they deal with the same kinds of cases and challenges that we’ve seen in misdemeanor courts across the board.
But in other ways, municipal courts are special. They belong to cities, which means they have a local character. The Supreme Court has also created some special rules for them. For example, municipal courts are permitted to have judges who are not lawyers. In some, police can act as prosecutors. There’s no right to a jury trial in many of these courts.
So we sometimes have a very high level of informality that we tolerate in these courts. And yet people are being convicted, incarcerated, and subject to many of the same burdens and experiences as people in other courts.
How did you come to this subject in your own research, and what was it that originally piqued your interest?
I’m interested in things we underestimate. A lot of our criminal system takes place off the radar, in places we don’t pay enough attention to. Over a decade ago, I got interested in misdemeanors—the low-level offenses that make up 80 percent of the American criminal system. I started gathering data that didn’t previously exist about misdemeanor dockets and tribunals. Because we tend to think of these cases as low status or minor, we tend not to collect data.
When I finished my book on misdemeanors, “Punishment Without Crime,” I promised myself that I would take a closer look at municipal courts, which are considered “limited jurisdiction”—meaning they can only adjudicate misdemeanors. Almost by definition, if you’re interested in misdemeanors, then you need to be interested in municipal courts.
What sorts of cases do municipal courts tend to handle, and what are some of the impacts for defendants going through these courts?
A good chunk of what municipal courts do looks just like other low-level criminal courts. They prosecute things like trespassing, DUI, driving without a license, and some prosecute juvenile cases.
But in many ways, municipal courts create an additional layer of criminalization. They enforce not only state misdemeanors, but also city ordinances. So the city council gets to decide what’s a crime and what’s the punishment. That has profound implications for the size and reach of our criminal system, because we’re inviting municipalities to join in the criminalization endeavor.
There are thousands of low-level offenses on the books that we call “fine only,” meaning the ultimate penalty is a fine, not incarceration. The Supreme Court has held that people aren’t entitled to counsel for fine-only misdemeanors, because they seem less important. But those fines can be crushing. We’ve heard time and again stories of people who are giving up necessities because of these enormous financial burdens. And there are many ways the criminal system can get around the “fine only” label, so that when you don’t pay the fine, you can go to jail. This is a big part of what we mean by the criminalization of poverty.
Much like the justice system as a whole, many of the harms of municipal courts overwhelmingly fall on low-income communities of color. How does that play out?
One of the ambitions of the Municipal Courts Project that I started is to shine greater light on what we know is occurring in some municipal courts, and across the entire misdemeanor system, which is that the heaviest impact is on the poor, the vulnerable, and on communities of color.
Because we have less data about municipal courts, and because they’re so diverse, we have less information about just how that works across the board. But one of the webinars in the series on municipal courts hosted by the Center specifically looked at inequality in municipal courts. A number of experts from around the country had a really important conversation about some of the sources of that inequality—what we know, what we don’t yet know, and about responses that we’re seeing to try to alleviate those disparities.
We’ve talked about some of the concerns around municipal courts, but what do you think some of the opportunities are in this realm?
I think the real invitation of municipal courts is community accountability. If you have an unjust experience in a state-run misdemeanor court, it’s very hard to change a state apparatus. That apparatus is really quite far from our everyday lives, from the neighborhood.
But that’s not true for municipal courts. Because they’re created and controlled by cities, accountability is no farther away than City Hall. And that seems very exciting—that a community could look at their municipal courts and say, “We think it should operate in a different way.” And at the most local level, that conversation could be democratically meaningful.
One of the goals of the Municipal Court Project is to try to create educational information to help communities better understand their own municipal court system. My hope is that more people can understand the aspect of the judiciary that they have the most democratic control over and engagement with.
Over the last year or so you’ve been working with the Center, JLUSA, and experts from across the country as part of a steering committee to hold a national conversation about these questions. Is there anything that has stood out to you in that experience?
I’ve been really pleased to get to work on the steering committee aspect of this project. Nothing in the criminal system happens single-handedly. It’s always the result of collective conversations among stakeholders, nonprofits, judges, and impacted individuals. The steering committee is an effort to bring together these different kinds of expertise.
One thing that has struck me is how incredibly diverse municipal courts and their stakeholders are. It really impressed upon me just how much is happening in this space, and how much common ground there is. All kinds of people care about their municipal court, whether it’s local officials or judges or community members who work in and around it. So it has really inspired me to think about how much we could do in conversation, in what I think it’s fair to say has been a pretty underappreciated space.
What do you see as the path forward in this realm, and how do you envision the future of municipal courts?
Change in the criminal system is never straightforward. But I think there’s an enormous opportunity for investment, accountability, and care in municipal courts. The steering committee, and many of the webinars in the Center’s webinar series, are full of examples of wonderful experiments people are trying.
Some of the changes are “top down”—the judge decides to open a special diversion program for veterans, people who are homeless, or for juveniles. Others are “bottom up”—the community comes together to organize a warrant clinic where they work with the court to try to clear warrants for people burdened by fines and fees.
Municipal courts are infinitely diverse, and there’s no one answer for all of them. But we’re having these conversations, and there’s so much insightful work going on. I think we can learn a lot from the people who are working in these spaces.