How AZ lawmakers want to eliminate juvenile court fees

After multiple tries, advocates hope Arizona lawmakers will finally send a bill to the governor to eliminate juvenile court fees.

It’s the third year in a row that similar legislation has been introduced. This year, Sen. David Gowan, R-Sierra Vista, is the primary sponsor, and Sen. Anna Hernandez, D-Phoenix, is the co-sponsor. Behind the bill is a coalition of advocates led by the education advocacy group Stand for Children Arizona.

If Senate Bill 1197 becomes law, Arizona would join 10 other states that have significantly reduced or eliminated juvenile court fees. The bill would also create a process to forgive existing debt and end the collection of previously assessed fees.

The bill would not affect a judge’s ability to issue fines related to victim restitution or certain DUI assessments.

In Arizona juvenile courts, fees — for court-appointed attorneys, probation, detention and diversion programs — can pile up for a young person and their family.

In Pinal County, for instance, a young person can be charged nearly $2,000 in juvenile court fees, according to an estimate by the policy advocacy clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

If a child’s family cannot pay the fees, Arizona law requires courts to issue an order for the unpaid balance when the young person turns 18. The order includes the collection of interest at 10% per year.

Payment of the fees — or a request to the court to modify them — is required for a person to have their juvenile record cleared.

“These kids turn 18, and the promise

of being able to destroy their juvenile record ... vanishes because they owe this money that they didn’t know they owed,” said public defender Chris Phillis, who works in Pinal County.

“We’re not giving them the fresh start that we promised them,” Phillis said. “We know they’re children. We know they’re going to make mistakes. And their focus really should be learning from that experience rather than getting hit with it in the face at 18.”

In Arizona, youth of color are overrepresented in referrals to juvenile court and detention, according to the 2020 Equitable Treatment of Minority Youth report card by the Arizona Supreme Court.

“These fees can ultimately be racially discriminatory,” said Devan Shea, who helps run the Berkeley Law clinic that studied Arizona’s juvenile court fees. “As these young people of color are pushed further into the system or are experiencing harsher punishments, they’re also getting more of the fees that are associated with each of these stages of the system.”

Arizona juvenile court fees add up

Erika Ovalle, who grew up in Maryvale and co-founded Puente Human Rights Movement and Decarcerate AZ, witnessed her brother spend most of his life in prison after he was first incarcerated in his early teens.

“He was in and out of court as a juvenile,” Ovalle said. He has a learning disability, and “the school was pushing him out,” she said. “The resources that he should’ve gotten were not available to him. My mom was not able to advocate for us.”

According to Ovalle, her brother’s unpaid fees hurt his credit. Now 47, he’s still fighting a combination of his juvenile and adult fees, she said.

Ovalle sees SB 1197 as low-hanging fruit. “If we stop criminalizing poor families, that’s a great start. If kids don’t rack up these fees and fines that are going to follow them to adulthood, let’s do it,” she said.

“I’m hoping this passes,” Ovalle said. “I hope that it excites people and it starts a whole movement and gets people to think critically about the way we punish children in our state and the lack of opportunities they have.”

At a Senate committee hearing on Feb. 8, Edith Fabián testified in support of the bill, telling lawmakers about her family’s experience of being financially burdened by juvenile court fees.

At 14, her brother was involved in a graffiti incident at school and was taken to juvenile detention, she said. Her family had to take out payday loans to get him out, which put a strain on her family, especially her mother, who had to work more, she said.

The interest rates on the loans were extremely high, and “it was very hard for us to get out of debt, but it’s what we needed to get my brother out of there,” Fabián said. “There were so many court proceedings, and the fees started piling up. So we couldn’t keep up,” she said.

A 2018 report by the Gault Center found that most counties in Arizona assess fees for court-appointed attorneys in juvenile court even though the U.S. Supreme Court established the right of minors to be represented by attorneys in 1964. According to the report, fees associated with legal representation can range from $25 to $400.

Attorneys fees are just the start. For instance, under Arizona law, probation supervision fees must be at least $50 per month unless a court determines that a parent cannot pay. Law also dictates that a fee of $20 is assessed for individuals who choose to pay via a payment plan.

Though most fees in Arizona are mandatory, judges do have the power to waive some fees. They also have the authority to reduce or waive some mandatory fees based on the family’s ability to pay.

In Phillis’ experience as a public defender, leaving ability to pay assessment decisions up to judicial discretion yields inconsistent results, she said. A $100 assessment may not sound like much to a judge who has never had to worry about choosing between buying groceries for dinner or making rent, Phillis said.

Phillis said judges have told her that young teens can come up with the $100 assessment ordered by the court for children placed on probation. She’s told judges that her clients’ families are struggling and has had the monthly probation service fee reduced from $60 to $45, but this amount was still a burden, she said.

Loss of revenue minor for counties, advocates say

At the Feb. 8 hearing of the Senate’s Military Affairs, Public Safety and Border Security Committee, a representative from the Arizona Association of Counties, Ryan Boyd, was the only person who spoke in opposition to the bill.

In some rural and smaller counties, said Boyd, the assessed fees “help us provide services like diversion programs, deflection programs that we hear a lot of broad, bipartisan support for.”

He was concerned that SB 1197 did not have an appropriation attached to it to make up for the lost revenue.

When the bill was first introduced in 2021 by Republican Walter Blackman, he ultimately pulled it out of concern that the lost revenue would result in unintended consequences for juvenile programs, said Rebecca Gau, the executive director of Stand for Children Arizona.

Last year’s version of this bill — also introduced by Blackman — had an appropriation of more than $2 million. Even so, the Arizona Association of Counties did not support it, which Boyd acknowledged during the hearing.

Gau said the appropriation in last year’s version was why the bill failed.

“Republicans didn’t like having an appropriation where taxpayers were filling in for something they thought was parent responsibility,” Gau said.

The bill’s supporters are not convinced that an appropriation is justified. They told legislators at the Feb. 8 hearing that while the financial burden the fees impose on families is great, the benefit they provide to counties is minor.

Shea said the cost of collecting the fees is high compared to the revenue they generate.

From public records requested in 2021, the Berkeley Law clinic found that Yuma County spends 98% of the revenue it makes from the fees on collection costs. Pima County spends 72%, Navajo County spends 65%, and Maricopa County spends 100% — with the caveat that Maricopa County only provided data on fees collected for attorney, probation and diversion fees.

Though the clinic requested data from all 15 Arizona counties, those four were the only ones that provided information on collection costs, Shea said. Some counties did not seem to track the revenue closely, she said.

Most of the states that have eliminated juvenile fees have done so without an appropriation, Shea said.

This year, Gau said she would prefer if legislators make a budget request to backfill any lost revenue rather than attaching an appropriation to the bill, which she sees as an obstacle to getting it passed.

“We certainly don’t want any underpaid employee of the state or county to feel shortchanged, but it shouldn’t be tied to this bill because that’s what bogged it down last year,” she said.

“They shouldn’t be trying to balance their budget on the backs of these kids,” she said. “If they need money for the salaries for the people who run the diversion programs, that’s a salary issue; that’s a budget issue.”

At least seven other states have introduced legislation to eliminate juvenile fees this session, Shea said.

The bill passed the Feb. 8 committee unanimously.