Let me start with credit where it's earned, because Minnesota got a big one right.
For years, across most of the country, if you couldn't pay a traffic fine, the state took your driver's license. Which meant you couldn't legally drive to the job you needed to earn the money to pay the fine to get the license back. It was a debt trap dressed up as public safety, and it caught about 11 million Americans at its peak. In 2021, Minnesota ended it. State law now flatly prohibits suspending a license "based solely on" failure to pay a fine or surcharge, and bars suspension for failing to appear on a petty-misdemeanor citation. Suspension is now reserved for what it should be — dangerous driving, DWI, injury crashes. Minnesota was ahead of most of the country here; twenty-six states have since made similar reforms.
That's the good news. Now the part that's still a poverty tax.
The $75 that lands on everything
Every criminal conviction in Minnesota — felony down to petty misdemeanor — carries an automatic $75 surcharge on top of the fine. Read that again: it applies to a petty misdemeanor, an offense that by definition isn't even a crime and carries a maximum fine of a few hundred dollars. On a low-level offense, the surcharge can be larger than the underlying penalty itself.
And it stacks. Minnesota law is explicit that the surcharge sits on top of the fine and any restitution — they add, they don't substitute. Layer on a county law-library fee (assessable even on petty offenses in the big counties), and a $50 problem becomes a $150 one, most of it fees that have nothing to do with the conduct and everything to do with funding the system off the backs of the people cycling through it.
There is an indigency provision — the surcharge can be waived or converted to community service for someone who genuinely can't pay. That's important, and it should be the norm rather than the exception. But it depends on a judge exercising it, and a defendant knowing to ask.
What happens when you can't pay
Here's where it compounds into something worse than an unpaid ticket. Minnesota collects court debt aggressively:
- Court debt as small as $25 can trigger a seizure of your state tax refund under the Revenue Recapture Act — often the single largest check a low-income family sees all year, intercepted for a traffic fine.
- Debt more than 121 days past due is referred to the Department of Revenue and to private collection agencies, with collection costs added on top of what you already owed.
- So a fine you couldn't pay grows — surcharge, fees, collection costs — into a bigger debt you really can't pay, and then it takes your refund.
There's a poverty-based cancellation available for debt below twice the federal poverty line, which is the right instinct. But the default machinery runs the other way: it assumes you can pay, and it gets more expensive precisely for the people who can't.
And the jail nobody was sentenced to
The most expensive fee of all is the one for being poor before trial. In Minnesota, about 67 percent of the jail population is unconvicted — people held pretrial, many simply because they can't post bail. Minnesota's court rules say release on your own recognizance is supposed to be the default and monetary conditions the least-restrictive option. But the rules still preserve a cash-bail track, and cash bail detains by wealth, not by danger: two people accused of the same thing, one goes home because he has $500 and one sits in jail because she doesn't. She may lose her job, her housing, her kids' stability — punishment imposed before anyone proved she did anything.
What we can do
Protect the license reform and finish it. Ending debt-based suspension was right; guard it, and make sure no administrative fee-collection loophole quietly reintroduces it.
Make the surcharge fit the offense. A flat $75 on a petty misdemeanor is a regressive tax masquerading as justice. Scale it to the offense, and make the ability-to-pay determination automatic rather than something a defendant has to know to request. Nobody should owe more in fees than the maximum penalty for what they actually did.
Stop funding the courts on the poor. A justice system that leans on fines and fees for revenue has an incentive to convict and to collect — exactly the wrong incentive. Fund the courts from the general fund like the essential public function they are, and stop the tax-refund seizures over $25 traffic debts.
And end wealth-based pretrial detention. If someone is dangerous, hold them on that finding; if they're not, don't jail them for lacking $500. Two-thirds of the people in Minnesota's jails haven't been convicted of anything. Many are there because they're poor. That's not public safety — it's a fee for poverty, collected in days of someone's life.
I spent years as a prosecutor and I believe in consequences. But a consequence that scales with your bank balance instead of your conduct isn't justice — it's a toll. Minnesota already proved it can fix one of these when it ended debt-based license suspension. Let's fix the rest.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minnesota statutes verified verbatim against raw text at revisor.mn.gov: the prohibition on suspending a driver's license based solely on failure to pay a fine or surcharge and on failure to appear for a petty-misdemeanor citation (Minn. Stat. § 171.16, subds. 3 and 3a, enacted 2021 First Special Session, ch. 5, art. 4), and the safety-based suspension grounds that remain (§ 171.18); the $75 surcharge on every conviction from felony to petty misdemeanor with its indigency waiver/community-service provision (§ 357.021, subd. 6) and the rule that surcharges stack on fines and restitution (§ 609.101); the Hennepin/Ramsey county law-library fee (§ 134A.09); the tax-refund intercept for court debt as low as $25 (Revenue Recapture Act, § 270A.03); mandatory referral to the Department of Revenue at 121 days past due and to private collection agencies with added collection costs (§ 16D.04), and the poverty-based cancellation for debtors below twice the federal poverty line (§ 16D.11); and the recognizance-default and least-restrictive-conditions provisions, alongside the preserved cash-bail track, of Minnesota Rule of Criminal Procedure 6.02. National context: the Fines and Fees Justice Center on states ending debt-based license suspension (26 states as of December 2025) and the Free to Drive coalition's estimate of roughly 11 million such suspensions nationally. Pretrial data: Prison Policy Initiative, on approximately 67 percent of Minnesota's jail population being unconvicted (2024).
Minnesota's pre-reform license-suspension counts, racial-disparity figures, and the state's total fee-revenue reliance were not obtained this pass and are not asserted. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.