The judge let his client out before trial, and if he’s found innocent he’ll walk away having paid nothing. But he could face a considerable amount of debt if he’s found guilty: $60 for a public defender, $55 an hour for that defender’s services, and a $173 general administrative fee. And depending on his potential sentence, he could be charged $40 a night in jail, $30 a month for probation, or a flat fee of $250 to do community service in lieu of incarceration.

These are all costs the 21 county judges have committed to taking seriously—and waiving or reducing when necessary. “The consensus that we would do this, that we would all do it, gives us cover that we wouldn’t be labeled as liberal or too soft on defendants,” district-court judge Elizabeth Trosch told me. “And it gives legitimacy to the practice change. This is a unified approach among judges.”

The judicial pact in Mecklenburg County was born of a working group; judges, public defenders, district attorneys, and court clerks had been strategizing since the spring of 2015 on how to reduce the county’s jail population. An analysis revealed that 18 percent were there because they failed to pay court costs, fines, or fees; and they stayed for roughly four to seven days, said district-court judge Becky Tin, who’s part of the working group. “A lot of these [legal financial obligations] that defendants were being arrested for not paying were set … without ever conducting an ability-to-pay hearing,” she said.

The costs of going to court in North Carolina have been climbing for years, suggested Democratic state Representative Marcia Morey, who was a Durham district-court judge before joining the legislature this spring. During her 18 years on the bench, she saw lawmakers raise the general court-cost fee from $47 to its current $173. “I don’t think they understand,” she told me, referring to her colleagues in the Republican-led legislature. “They’ve never been in a courtroom—they don’t understand the hardships these defendants face. They want more money coming into the state revenue.”

The money collected by the courts is dispersed to four state agencies and 611 counties and municipalities. All told, the fines, fees, and other court costs generate $700 million for the state’s general fund, where it’s diverted to courthouse maintenance, public education, and police training, among other government functions.

As I reported in July, this setup is not uncommon, nor is legislators’ determination to maintain a vital revenue stream. A Texas state official described to me how lawmakers’ “nickel-and-diming over a period of time … increase[s] the fees and fines.” In the process, the state only becomes more dependent on the money. A single increase “in an individual bill … doesn’t look like a big impact,” the official said. “But when you add up the five or six occurring in a session, then obviously it has a bigger impact.”