Brazos Matters: Rethinking Justice with College Station Municipal Court Judge Ed Spillane

Ten years ago, College Station Municipal Court Judge Edward Spillane III wrote a Washington Post op-ed — ""Why I Refuse to Send People to Jail for Failure to Pay Fines"" — that struck a national nerve and pushed cities across the country to rethink how they treat people who genuinely can't afford their fines. In this episode of “Brazos Matters,” host Jay Socol and student contributor Kaleigh Mazy ’26 ask Judge Spillane to look back on what's changed since then — and what hasn't. Spillane, who has presided over College Station's municipal court since 2002, walks through the roughly 30,000 Class-C misdemeanor cases his court handles each year and the alternative sentencing programs he's built to keep people out of jail: community living classes, warrant amnesty periods, payment plans, and a peer-run teen court that he says outperforms even felony boot camp at preventing repeat offenses. The conversation also digs into some pressing modern issues facing the court system: how booking photos and public records now get bought and sold by data brokers long after a case is resolved, how court-impersonation scams and fraudulent texts have become a daily nuisance, and why College Station sees a strikingly disproportionate share of the state's minor-in-possession cases — nearly 20% of all MIP filings in Texas — tied largely to the Northgate entertainment district. “Brazos Matters” is a production of Aggieland's Public Media — KAMU-FM and KAMU-TV — members of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement.