Of late, at the end of every legislative session we have seen some degree of expansion in the costs assessed against criminal defendants in the form of fees, many times payable to the state at the conclusion of their cases.
While this is entirely appropriate, I have noted anecdotally that large escalation in fees imposed on criminal defendants often time results in higher costs to the rest of the system but are most likely hidden from an accounting of the collection of those fees.
While this question certainly needs more study from my perspective in the prosecution, law enforcement and to some smaller extent, the defense; there is a danger that as fees assessed against convicted defendants rise the cost of enforcing the collection of those fees and the consequences of their nonpayment can have a heavy cost to the system. In many cases convicted parties would rather see if the court will issue a warrant for non-payment and if the cops will bother to find and jail them instead of paying a high fee. This process can often turn out to be more expensive than the fee and it might be the case that a lower fee that the person might pay, nets more money than a higher amount levied but not paid plus the cost of prosecution and incarceration for the non-payment.
All economic systems contain within them some amount of indifference curves, where as the price of an object increases there is a point where individuals will choose it's substitute and make no mistake, the relationship between the amount of fees and their payment is an economic system.
This relationship really should be studied since the two portions of the system of collection and enforcement for nonpayment do not directly offset their costs. More study needs to be done on this topic make to insure we are not raising money on one hand and costing more on the other.
