About

Alexes Harris is a sociologist and a Presidential Term Professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Sociology. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2002. Her research employs a mixed-method approach to study institutional decision-making, with a focus on social stratification processes and racial and ethnic disparities. Harris investigates how contact with various institutions such as educational, juvenile, criminal justice, and economic systems impacts individuals' life chances. Her work combines data types like participant observation, interviews, and statistical analysis to explore how institutional actors assess, label, and process individuals and groups, and how those processed respond. Her aim is to produce theoretically informed and empirically rich research that informs local, state, and national policy arenas. Harris has taught undergraduate courses on race and ethnicity, social problems, juvenile justice, and special topics courses related to credit markets, criminal sentencing, sports, higher education, and race. She also teaches graduate-level research methods courses on qualitative research methods. Her current research project, 'A Pound of Flesh,' examines the relationship between the U.S. systems of social control and inequality, specifically analyzing policies and mechanisms within the criminal justice system that impose and monitor sanctions on poor people who do not pay their legal debts. Her work highlights how monetary sanctions serve as a punishment tool that perpetuates marginalization of the poor. Harris is actively involved in research projects, has authored a forthcoming book, and has received significant grants, including a multi-year, multi-million dollar study funded by the Arnold Foundation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Law
• Criminology
• Finance
• Law and economics
• Psychology
• Monetary economics
• Social psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Reflections on the Power of Ethnography for Justice Research and Policy

  Qualitative Sociology · 2025-07-25

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Silver sanctions: Legal financial obligations in an aging population

  Advances in Life Course Research · 2025-05-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “It's like a reverse Robin Hood—We all know they can't pay”: How court actors navigate the logics of monetary sanctions

  Criminology · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Monetary sanctions (also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs) are the most common form of state sanction for criminal convictions, yet we know little about the logics that court actors use in their implementation. Merging an inhabited institutions perspective with the institutional logics framework, we present evidence from court actors' accounts of imposing and collecting LFOs to reveal how they navigate the competing penal and fiscal logics of LFO sentencing across eight states. We show that the polyvalent logics underlying LFOs give rise to individual and collective critiques. Amid this discontent, we discern several patterns in how court actors navigate the tensions between coexisting logics and continue their work unabated, including the use of discretion and prioritization of some goals over others. Our analysis demonstrates how court actors make sense of their work within a complex legal field rife with conflicting priorities and how LFO sentencing and collection persist despite the contradictory logics undergirding them. Our theoretical model connecting institutional logics and inhabited institutions frameworks elucidates how decision-making in the criminal legal system operates. Although we specifically examine monetary sanctions, our findings have implications for other contexts in which decision-makers struggle with interpretation, application, and consequence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “It's like a reverse Robin Hood—We all know they can't pay”: How court actors navigate the logics of monetary sanctions

  CrimRxiv · 2025-04-17

  preprintOpen access

  Monetary sanctions (also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs) are the most common form of state sanction for criminal convictions, yet we know little about the logics that court actors use in their implementation. Merging an inhabited institutions perspective with the institutional logics framework, we present evidence from court actors’ accounts of imposing and collecting LFOs to reveal how they navigate the competing penal and fiscal logics of LFO sentencing across eight states. We show that the polyvalent logics underlying LFOs give rise to individual and collective critiques. Amid this discontent, we discern several patterns in how court actors navigate the tensions between coexisting logics and continue their work unabated, including the use of discretion and prioritization of some goals over others. Our analysis demonstrates how court actors make sense of their work within a complex legal field rife with conflicting priorities and how LFO sentencing and collection persist despite the contradictory logics undergirding them. Our theoretical model connecting institutional logics and inhabited institutions frameworks elucidates how decision-making in the criminal legal system operates. Although we specifically examine monetary sanctions, our findings have implications for other contexts in which decision-makers struggle with interpretation, application, and consequence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Income Extraction via the Criminal Legal System: A Community-Level Perspective

  CrimRxiv · 2024-06-19

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Legal financial obligations (LFOs) are financial penalties imposed by U.S. criminal courts that generate disproportionate negative effects for poor and minoritized individuals and communities. In this visualization, the authors use court administrative data for all criminal cases in Washington and Minnesota from 2010 to 2015 to measure community-level income extraction via LFOs in Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Unlike previous measures of LFOs at the community level, the authors calculate the proportion of income in a given census tract that is extracted in the form of LFOs. This operationalization makes it possible to ask, given a tract-year’s existing income per capita, what proportion of that income went toward LFOs from cases sentenced. The authors’ maps demonstrate that disadvantaged communities pay a higher share of their income in LFOs compared with more advantaged neighborhoods, perpetuating social control and poverty at the neighborhood level.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 27. Monetary Sanctions as a Pound of Flesh

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2024-04-25 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Income Extraction via the Criminal Legal System: A Community-Level Perspective

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Legal financial obligations (LFOs) are financial penalties imposed by U.S. criminal courts that generate disproportionate negative effects for poor and minoritized individuals and communities. In this visualization, the authors use court administrative data for all criminal cases in Washington and Minnesota from 2010 to 2015 to measure community-level income extraction via LFOs in Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Unlike previous measures of LFOs at the community level, the authors calculate the proportion of income in a given census tract that is extracted in the form of LFOs. This operationalization makes it possible to ask, given a tract-year’s existing income per capita, what proportion of that income went toward LFOs from cases sentenced. The authors’ maps demonstrate that disadvantaged communities pay a higher share of their income in LFOs compared with more advantaged neighborhoods, perpetuating social control and poverty at the neighborhood level.

  PublisherDOI

• Monetary sanctions in the age of mass incarceration: addressing the harms of mass criminal legal debt

  Policy Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Monetary sanctions in the age of mass incarceration: addressing the harms of mass criminal legal debt

  Policy Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapterOpen access

  Monetary sanctions (legal financial obligations, or LFOs) are the fines, fees, surcharges, interest, and restitution im-posed by the legal system on people who are issued cita-tions or make contact with criminal courts. The use of monetary sanctions has escalated dramatically over the decades and remains the most common form of punish-ment across the United States. This increase has raised im-portant questions about the relationship between financial penalties and the system of mass incarceration. Mass in-carceration has put tremendous fiscal pressure on govern-ments as they deal with ballooning criminal legal expendi-tures. Many governments have turned to monetary sanc-tions to absorb some of this cost, particularly in smaller ju-risdictions. These efforts involve increasing fines and fees for lower-level offenses and the increased use of LFOs in conjunction with other punishments such as incarceration. Thus, in addition to mass incarceration, we are also experi-encing an era of mass criminal legal debt. As reformists continue to push for alternatives to incarceration, it is vital to understand how these alternatives impact the predomi-nantly poor communities of color, especially those overrepresented among the justice-involved population. Individuals are often mandated to pay fees for their proba-tion, electronic home monitoring, and various rehabilitative services and treatment programs. This practice tends to widen the scope of individuals saddled with legal debt or extra-legal expenses for court-ordered treatment. At the same time, it creates what Pattillo and Kirk call “layaway freedom,” in which freedom from the criminal legal system (CLS) becomes contingent on an individual’s ability to pay.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Certain states, including Arizona, have begun scrapping court costs and fees for people unable to pay – two experts on legal punishments explain why

  2023-12-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michele Cadigan

  10 shared

• Sarah Shannon

  University of Georgia

  10 shared

• Tyler J. S. Smith

  University of Bristol

  7 shared

• Katherine Beckett

  University of Washington

  6 shared

• Ryan Larson

  Hamline University

  6 shared

• Bryan L. Sykes

  5 shared

• Frank Edwards

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  5 shared

• Christopher Uggen

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

Labs

• Alexes Harris LabPI

Awards & honors

• Alexes Harris Named University's Faculty Athletic Representa…
• Alexes Harris Receives Arnold Foundation Grant to Study Mone…
• Professor Harris Receives 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award…
• Alexes Harris joins colleages in the Washington State Academ…