Movement against juvenile court fees runs into resistance
WASHINGTON — California this month became the first state to eliminate court costs, fees and fines for young offenders. But court officials and legislators wary of forfeiting a key source of revenue have raised roadblocks in states and localities that have tried to follow suit.
The Trump administration has further blunted momentum by scrapping an Obama-era warning against imposing excessive fees and fines on juveniles. Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the move as part of a broader effort to overhaul regulatory procedures at the Department of Justice. The administration declined to comment on whether it supports the imposition of such fees.
The state of Utah, the city of Philadelphia, and Johnson County, Kan., are among the handful of jurisdictions that have scaled back juvenile fees and fines in the past year, but none has gone as far as California.
“It feels like a steep climb now,” said Joanna Visser Adjoian, co-founder and co-director of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, which successfully fought to end Philadelphia’s policy of billing parents for the costs of detaining their children.
A report released in 2016 by Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit, found that in almost every state and the District of Columbia, minors who appear in the millionplus cases heard in juvenile court each year may be charged for multiple court-related costs, fines and fees. Courts use the money for witness fees, court operations, public defender fees and probation supervision. They also spend it on health care, GPS monitoring and drug tests, among many other items and services.
The fines and fees vary widely. In Alameda County, which did away with its fees in 2016, juveniles in the justice system were charged an average of $2,000 to pay public defenders and cover the cost of GPS monitoring, among other services. For a single parent earning the federal minimum wage, that translates into about two months of salary. In Idaho, juveniles are fined $1,000 each time they violate probation.
In many places, the fees are similar to what adults are charged. The difference is that few young offenders have the money to pay them — many, in fact, are too young to work. That means their parents or guardians often end up being liable for their fees and fines. For youths and their families, failing to make the payments may result in incarceration, suspension of driver’s licenses and an inability to expunge or seal records.
Research suggests the fees and fines have a disproportionate impact on families of color and may fuel recidivism. They also can cost cities and counties more to collect than the revenue they bring in. In a report it released last year, the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley Law School cited a case in which Los Angeles County spent $13,000 trying to collect $1,000 from a grandmother who was charged for her granddaughter’s detention.
A 2017 report by the National Center for State Courts found that most states do not have systems in place to evaluate a family’s ability to pay fees for juvenile probation supervision or to waive those fees when appropriate to do so.
Several years ago, the strife in Ferguson, Mo., helped raise awareness of the role court fees play in keeping the poor caught up in the criminal justice system. Conservatives such as Right on Crime, a Texas-based legal policy group, have joined liberals in opposing excessive fees and fines as costly — since they lead to more people being incarcerated — and unfair.