Library fines punish the poor and don’t work

Library fines are a flat charge disproportionately impacting people who are most likely to have difficulty maintaining a reliably-scheduled life and least likely to be able to pay — that is, people with insecure work and housing.

There have been few studies on the effectiveness of library fines in the last decade, and most were in academic libraries. They tend to indicate either a very minor statistically significant effect on rates of items being returned on time, or no correlation at all. On the other hand, libraries that remove overdue fines anecdotally report:

• Large increases in borrowing and general use of the library;
• Significant improvements in the public perception of and satisfaction with the library.

So the onus should be on those arguing to retain fines to prove that fining people for returning items late actually works as an effective incentive for timely return of items compared to other less punitive approaches.

“Removing overdue fines” does not equal “No consequences for returning items late or not returning them at all”. Equally, “Fining for overdues” does not equal “All items are eventually returned”.

Every library, regardless of whether they impose fines or not, has a level of “shrinkage” in the collection that has to eventually be written off. Typically libraries that have removed fines (and indeed also those that haven’t) use some or all of the following techniques to get things flowing through the system:

• reminder notices (via email, SMS and sometimes post) just before and at various points after the due date;
• limits on total loans so that people can’t take out hundreds of items and disappear;
• restrictions on new borrowing if any items are overdue;
• restrictions on use of all library services (e.g. WiFi, PCs, placing a hold on an item) if any items are overdue;
• items declared lost and a “lost item” invoice sent after they are due for a certain number of days (typically 60, sometimes as low as 30)
• incentives such as increased borrowing or reservation limits for borrowers who do not have any overdues for a certain period of time (e.g. in the previous year)

Further reading

• Ayre, Lori Bowen (2019), Cents and Sensibility: Late fees do not belong in public libraries, Collaborative Librarianship: Vol. 11 : Iss. 2;
• Unrein, Sabrina. (2020). Overdue Fines: Advantages, Disadvantages, and How Eliminating Them Can Benefit Public Libraries. Syracuse, NY: iSchool Public Libraries Initiative at Syracuse University.