Within the last decade, scholars and practitioners alike have noted a surge in the use of legal financial obligations (LFOs) in criminal justice processing. These include fines, fees, and costs that are applied to defendants’ cases from “upstream” agencies such as police departments to “downstream” agencies including jails, prisons, probation and parole agencies, and treatment centers. Legal financial obligations can be large, and the result is that outstanding balances often accumulate into unwieldy amounts of criminal justice debt. Recently, a small handful of qualitative studies have shown that these LFOs and debts can have adverse impacts on returning prisoners and their families, including increased stress, strained family relationships, worsened depression, and longer periods spent under criminal justice surveillance for those too poor to pay off outstanding balances. In addition, some of this work suggests that these financial obligations can increase the likelihood of returning to crime. This dissertation expands on the major contributions of these recent qualitative works by addressing the lack of quantitative research in this area. Toward this end, longitudinal data from the Returning Home Study (n=740) and structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques are used to test whether LFOs and debt indeed have adverse impacts on key outcomes of interest in reentry research, including family relationships, depression, justice involvement/entanglement, and recidivism. Findings reveal partial support for past research and theory. Legal financial obligations do not appear to have impacts on depression, family conflict, and several measures of recidivism on average. However, outstanding debt owed to community supervision agencies (i.e., probation/parole/mandatory community supervision) significantly increases the likelihood of remaining under supervision, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of returning to prison. Implications for decision-making bodies from state legislatures to corrections agencies are discussed. / Criminal Justice

La lutte internationale contre le blanchiment d’argent et le financement du terrorisme peut être définie comme l’ensemble des mesures qui concourent à l’éradication des flux financiers illicites.Le cadre juridique tel qu’il est défini de nos jours et intégré dans les ordres juridiques nationaux est une combinaison des conventions de l’Organisation des Nations Unies (ONU) et des Recommandations du Groupe d’Action Financière (GAFI). Il a été construit ces trente dernières années en raison de la menace que représentent certaines formes de criminalité : trafic illicite de stupéfiants, criminalité transnationale organisée, terrorisme et son financement.La présente étude se propose de matérialiser l’émergence d’un principe intrinsèque à la lutte contre les flux financiers illicites à travers le concept de sécurité financière internationale, qui apparait comme la finalité des mesures adoptées dans le cadre de la lutte internationale contre le blanchiment de capitaux et le financement du terrorisme.Nous illustrons cette hypothèse à partir d’une analyse de la politique criminelle internationale, autrement dit, l’ensemble des procédés par lesquels la communauté internationale organise les réponses au phénomène de la criminalité financière. Celle-ci permet de dessiner les contours de ce que nous qualifions de sécurité financière et démontre que la réponse de la communauté internationale au phénomène de la criminalité financière, tend inexorablement vers l’instauration d’un ordre à l’échelle internationale.Cette sécurité financière est synonyme d’ordre. Un ordre qui s’établit aussi bien en droit international que dans les droits internes, un ordre qui est caractérisé par un « droit à texture multiple avec primauté de la soft law ».Cet ordre justifie et fonde à la fois les obligations préventives et répressives, malgré les restrictions qu’il apporte à certains droits fondamentaux. Cet ordre regroupe de fait, un ensemble de prescriptions dont l’objectif est de préserver la société internationale des facteurs de désordre que sont les flux financiers illicites, le crime organisé, et le terrorisme.La sécurité financière est à la fois un objectif à atteindre et une nécessité majeure.Nous consolidons cette hypothèse par une réflexion sur les enjeux que représente l’instauration d’une sécurité financière et sur les moyens susceptibles d’en garantir l’effectivité. / The international fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism can be defined as the set of measures helping eradicate illicit financial flows.The legal framework as it is settled on and implemented into national legal orders is a combination of the United Nations (UN) conventions and the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).It was built over the past 30 years in response to the threat posed by certain forms of crime such as drug trafficking, transnational crime and the financing of terrorism.This work ambitions to highlight the emergence of an inherent principle to the fight against criminal financial flows through the concept of international financial security, which appears as the main goal of the measures adopted in the context aforementioned.We illustrate this assumption with an analysis of the international crime policy, in other words all the processes through which the international community organizes responses to the phenomenon of financial crime. This analysis permits to behold the shape of what we call “financial security” and demonstrates that the answer of the international community tends inexorably to the establishment of a sort of “international financial security”.This financial security stands for an order.An order established in both international law and domestic law, an order that is characterized by what we call "droit à texture multiple avec primauté de la soft law".This order justifies and bases both preventive and repressive obligations, despite the restrictions it imposes on fundamental rights. This order contains a whole set of prescriptions whose aim to protect the international society from the factors of disorder such us illicit financial flows, organized crime and terrorism.Financial security is as much a goal to reach as a necessity.We consolidate this premise with an afterthought on the challenge of establishing financial security and the means that can be used to guarantee its effectiveness.