After more than a year in a juvenile detention facility in Orange County, California, Maria Rivera’s son was released back in 2010. As he exited incarceration, the Orange County Probation Department handed Rivera a bill for $16,372, the fees officials charged for keeping him in custody.
Rivera sold her home and put $9,508 of those profits toward paying off the $23.90 a day, plus $2,199 for legal expenses, that the county calculated as her son’s debt, according to court papers. When the county sued to collect the balance, her judgment grew to $9,905. In 2011, when Rivera filed for bankruptcy, the county claimed Rivera owed “domestic support,” a category not protected by bankruptcy laws. Five years later, a bankruptcy appeals court dismissed the county’s claim. The probation department was not a caregiver, the court ruled, but a law enforcement agency tasked with incarcerating people.
Rivera couldn’t be reached for comment about that years-old dispute over the county’s bill. Her former attorney, Brett Ramsaur, has no updated contact information for her. (And no responses were received from several publicly listed telephone numbers for Orange County women by the same name). But Ramsaur recalls being so appalled at the county’s treatment of single, unemployed Rivera that he represented her for free. “We took the case because we thought it was an issue worth fighting for,” he recalled recently. “The Ninth Circuit [court] certainly had negative things to say about the county’s insistence on collecting this type of debt.”
The court, he noted, agreed with him that the county showed a “misguided sense of values.”
Outrage over cases like Rivera’s and that of Mariana Cuevas, a Bay Area house cleaner who was charged more than $10,000 for her son’s detention even after all the charges were dropped, according to a Berkeley Law School report, prompted California in 2018 to become the first state in the nation to stop charging families for a child’s incarceration. Today, 31 states continue to charge families for the costs of managing their kids behind bars, according to analyses done by the Juvenile Law Center.
Additionally, since 2018, 13 states have passed laws eliminating certain categories of fines and fees, including housing costs. And 20 states no longer charge child support or cost-of-custody fees, according to the law center.
The states that continue to levy families do so despite the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges decrying those charges. “The core functions necessary for our nation’s juvenile courts to meet their rehabilitative goals should be fully funded by governmental revenue and not by revenue generated by fines, fees and costs,” the council asserts.
Some detention fees disappear; families still are ‘nickeled and dimed’
The average total of court-related fines and fees levied against more than 1,000 people in 14 states had been $13,607, according to a 2015 survey conducted by research partners including Youth Breakout, a Louisiana group serving LGBTQ persons in the juvenile justice system.
Housing is the highest expense that families in those 31 states are required to cover.
The hefty housing charges aside, families are “nickeled and dimed” in a range of other ways, said Lindsey Smith, speaking while an attorney at the Juvenile Law Center. Smith, who recently left the center, co-authored its 2022 report, Reimagining Restitution, a follow-up to the center's 2016 report, Debtors Prisons for Kids.
“Some states charge an application fee, between $50 to $100, just to apply to say ‘I’m too poor to hire an attorney.’”
Amy Borror, The Gault Center’s senior youth policy strategist
The law center has argued that detention facilities and juvenile courts have too much leeway in what they can charge. For example, there are fees to park at detention facilities, $1-a-minute phone calls and 25-cent-per-email charges.
Kansas law, as one example, allows authorities to charge families up to $45 for fingerprinting, $200 to take a court-ordered DNA sample and up to $400 for a urinalysis, according to a 2020 state assessment done by the National Juvenile Defender Center, now known as the Gault Center. It is studying juvenile court systems and detention costs in all 50 states.
“Some states charge an application fee, between $50 to $100, just to apply to say ‘I’m too poor to hire an attorney,’” said Amy Borror, the Gault Center’s senior youth policy strategist, referring to barriers to even getting a public defender.
Others pass along an entire attorney’s cost to families. “This is a constitutional right. It’s the state’s obligation to provide it. Our position is, children should always have a public defender. Because what child out there can afford an attorney on their own? Family should never be charged for this.”
Unpaid detention fees can mean garnished wages, arrest for parents
Even money families designate to pay for behind-the-bars expenses — including telephone calls, emails and commissary food to supplement what some argue is a lack of nutrition in prison-provided meals for youth who are still growing physically — can be intercepted to pay outstanding fines and fees.
“To have a family scrimp and save money for extra food for their child to eat and then have the state take that, it’s just inhumane,” attorney Smith had said.
Some states intercept tax refunds, garnish wages or send summonses that can result in jail, she added.
During the Gault Center’s now 20-year-old assessment of state juvenile court systems, including their systems for charging fines and fees, attorney Borror said she was particularly struck by what she once overheard at the entrance to a Michigan facility.
“I was sitting behind the main desk and an older gent — he must have been in his 60s — came up to the window,” she recalled. “Somebody … said to me, ‘That’s mister so-and-so. He had a child in the court here in the 1990s. He still comes in every month and makes a small payment to his debt.’ I just think that’s really sad and infuriating.”
The Michigan findings were published in 2020. Utah is the 29th state being assessed by the Gault Center, whose review is underway.
Assessors have heard from defense lawyers and family members who have said the fines and fees governments have charged them can add up to tens of thousands of dollars — even in some extreme cases more than $100,000.
“This needs to be eliminated. Period,” Borror said. “It’s appalling to think that the state would remove a child and, then, turn around and charge families.”
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Connecticut-based journalist Tristram Korten covers criminal justice and the environment.