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 But the charges - as much as $5,640 for an average 25-day sentence -
do more harm than good, a recent report suggests.
“These fees are harmful, unlawful and costly in California,” said
lead author Stephanie Campos-Bui, an attorney with the Policy
Advocacy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of
Law. “These fees need to be ended.”
Parents have been billed thousands of dollars in fees even after
their kids are judged not guilty - a practice the report says
persists although it violates the law.
The report, titled “Making Families Pay,” is just “one more in a
recent line of studies that have shown that these kinds of fees do
more harm than good,” said Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at
the University of Texas at Dallas, who was not involved with the
study.
“The fees harm the kids, they harm the families, and they ultimately
harm the communities,” he said in a phone interview.
The result of a three-year investigation, the report details how the
fees undermine the juvenile-justice system’s rehabilitative purpose
by burdening already struggling families and by disproportionately
hurting poor families of color.
It documents how the fees - assessed in states throughout the nation
- force families to choose between paying them, paying rent or
buying food and other necessities.
At the same time, the report shows that the fees frequently cost
counties more to collect than they bring in, and counties generally
collect just a small fraction of what they bill.
Moreover, though California law requires the juvenile-justice system
to work to “preserve and strengthen the minor’s family ties,” the
fees strain relationships between detained youth and their families
and weaken the ties, the report found.
An Alameda County father faced having his wages garnished to pay for
his son’s detention.
“Will that make me a better father?” he asked in a 2015 interview
with one of the researchers. “Will that make me a better person? No.
It will make me more angry at my son.”
A proposed law would stop the practice of charging the fees anywhere
in the state. But the fees extend well beyond California.
“As much as I am outraged by California’s way of doing things, other
states are worse,” Campos-Bui said in a phone interview. In some
states, she said, children are forced to remain on probation until
their families pay off the fees.
Over the past year, five California counties quit billing the fees.
One of the five, Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley,
spent $450,000 to collect $400,000.
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Los Angeles County spent nearly $13,000 trying to get $1,000 from a
grandmother living on Social Security benefits.
Some U.S. municipalities were believed to have begun charging the
fees in the 1970s, when they suspected parents of dropping off their
kids at juvenile facilities because they could no longer manage
them. But Campos-Bui said she turned up no “evidence that parents
were using juvenile hall as some type of babysitting service.”
The report did find evidence of racial and ethnic inequities. The
family of a black youth serving average probation conditions was
liable for more than double the fees as the family of a white youth
serving average probation conditions. And the family of a Latino
youth serving average probation conditions was liable for one and a
half times more than the family of a white youth.
At the same time, black children are four times more likely to be
arrested and seven times more likely to be detained than white
children in California, the report says.
“The majority of these kids are relatively poor, minorities, and
they do not have the resources to pay these fees,” Piquero said.
“There is significant harm to all families going through the system.
But families of color bear a higher burden than white families,”
Campos-Bui said. “You’re setting up these kids to fail.”
Maria Rivera sold her house to pay $9,500 toward her $16,372 debt to
Orange County for her son’s detention and lawyer, the report says.
When the county pursued the balance of the debt, Rivera filed for
bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the county continued to pursue the debt -
until a federal court admonished it to stop.
In its ruling last year, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals called the fees “a tax upon distress” and condemned
them for taking “advantage of people when they are at their most
vulnerable.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2pL6BAO University of California Berkeley Law
Policy Clinic, online May 1, 2017.
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