Nearly 400 Years of Laws Targeting Black Virginians Set the Stage for Today’s Criminal Legal System

Since the colonial era, Virginia has used the law to restrict many aspects of Black people’s daily lives. As Black Virginians built political and economic power after emancipation, lawmakers repeatedly responded with new policies designed to slow that progress — choices that perpetuated patterns still visible today in fines and fees that limit opportunity and trap families in debt.

A new report from The Commonwealth Institute, “Honest History: How Fines and Fees Came to Harm Black Communities in Virginia,” documents how the violence of early Virginia laws — using legal enforcement to control Black people and extract revenue — reappeared in different forms over generations. Policy choices in the late 20th century mirrored the late 19th-century dynamic of legislative reaction to progress for Black people and resulted in increased incarceration of Black people. These approaches accelerated the use of fines and fees, which continue to funnel people into debt and create barriers to economic security to this day.

“Even as the language of the laws changed across centuries, the effects often remained the same: creating barriers to freedom, opportunity, and economic security for Black families and communities,” said Kami Blatt, who leads TCI’s work to reform policies that criminalize poverty and co-authored the report. “Recognizing that pattern helps us understand how to dismantle it — and how Virginia can build a system that is more fair and respects everyone’s dignity.”

The report highlights several themes:

• Post-slavery laws laid the groundwork for using the legal system to control and extract from Black people, establishing patterns that persisted across generations.
• Late 20th-century policy choices — including “broken windows” policing and punitive sentencing — pushed Black Virginians into the legal system and expanded the use of fines and fees. 
• Virginia’s reliance on fines and fees to fund our legal system reflects a broader pattern of regressive revenue policy, which often asks the most of people with the least.
• Fines and fees continue to create long-term barriers to economic and civic participation, especially for Black and low-income communities.
• There is also a long history of resistance and organizing in Virginia — often Black-led and sometimes multiracial — to create fairer laws and revenue systems.

The report also emphasizes that lawmakers have the power to break these patterns by choosing approaches that promote fairness in our revenue and legal systems, but more importantly, fairness and economic security for people who call Virginia home.

“The fines and fees trapping Black and low-income families in cycles of poverty and incarceration today didn’t emerge by chance — they were built through generations of policy choices —  and lawmakers can make different choices today,” said Ashley Kenneth, President and CEO at TCI. “When we ground reform in honest history and in the expertise of people who’ve lived these harms, we can begin to build a system that advances racial and economic justice instead of undermining it.”

As lawmakers debate criminal legal reforms in the upcoming session, TCI urges them to center those discussions in an understanding of how past policy decisions continue to shape current outcomes — and to pursue solutions that promote fairness, stability, and opportunity for everyone.