Courts fees can put the squeeze on Florida teen offenders. Some leaders want to end that
In a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Miami-Dade Children’s Courthouse, Judge Orlando Prescott lectures a 17-year-old boy about the importance of associating with trustworthy people — and being trustworthy himself. “You’ll never get in trouble for the truth; you’ll get in trouble for a lie,” the gray-goateed Prescott admonished the teen, who was accused of running away from home and not attending school but insisted it was not so. The youth did some on-the-spot soul searching, changed his story, and admitted he’d been staying elsewhere, as the judge suspected. Satisfied that the teen had come clean, the one-time prosecutor put him on probation, provided he go to counseling.
What Prescott didn’t do: impose a series of monetary fines and fees that the teen almost certainly couldn’t pay. The Juvenile Law Center, a national advocacy association, is working around the nation to persuade states to eliminate juvenile court fees, arguing that they are the equivalent of a tax on hard-pressed parents already struggling to keep their children in line. It is part of a juvenile justice reform effort gaining steam nationwide.
Just like adults, Florida juvenile offenders can be slapped with fees for the cost of prosecution and supervision, as well as the cost of a public defender — and, at the discretion of the judge, restitution. Records show that in the vast majority of those cases — roughly 90% in 2019, according to a University of Miami studyEditSign — those assessments go unpaid. That debt can come back to haunt a former youthful offender, popping up at inopportune times, like when they are applying for a driver’s license or seeking a job. In Florida alone, two million drivers are either driving on suspended licenses — or not driving at all — due to unpaid court debt, according to the New York University Brennan Center for Justice.
Reform advocates say if the goal is to turn delinquent youths into law-abiding adults, making it hard for them to apply for loans, legally drive or get a job is counter-productive. The unpaid court debt hurts the credit scores of youths in the system, barring them from accessing services. In Florida, people with unpaid court fines and fees cannot get certified for jobs such as barbers or AC technicians. An unpaid fine can even prevent an adult from being licensed to practice law. Some states like Louisiana, in response to the national movement, have gotten rid of court fines and fees altogether for juveniles. Others, like Texas, have greatly limited the number of fees and fines assess to juveniles. But in Florida, which accounts for one in every four adult life sentences in the nation and where ever-tougher treatment of criminals is often a winning political formula, helping offenders, even juveniles, is a hard sell. The state, in fact, is going in another direction.
Since 1996, Florida has created more than 20 new types of fees, and, at the same time, eliminated most exemptions for those who cannot afford to pay them, according to the Brennan Center. Some changes include increased service charges for getting drivers’ licenses reinstated, and sending liens on unpaid debt to collection agencies, where up to an additional 40% can be added in collection fees.” Since 2021, there have been four bills that attempted to eliminate court fines and fees for juveniles. All of them failed. Sponsors are hoping for a better result this year; there are two bills pending during the current legislative session that opened this week. Similar legislation intended to protect Floridians from losing their drivers’ licenses over unpaid court debt suffered the same fate. Of 15 bills filed since 2016 to curb such suspensions, all but one failed. The one piece of legislation that did pass, in 2019, designated certain days when debtors could seek relief from unpaid court fines and fees — and thus have their licenses reinstated. Acting upon pleas from advocates, lawmakers have introduced bills this session to greatly expand the program.
In the adult justice system, fees have become a factor used to prevent those who seemingly have paid their debt to society to have their right to vote restored. In 2018, 65% of voters supported a referendum, placed on the ballot as the result of a petition drive, to restore the voting rights of felons who had completed their sentences. Following the measure’s passage, though, lawmakers approved legislation that requires ex-felons to pay all court- and prison-related fines and fees first. Advocates claim that haphazard, decentralized record keeping can make it difficult for some to comply with the requirement. The U.S. Supreme Court, in 2020, affirmed the law by refusing to hear a challenge raised by two felons. Jeff Brandes, recently term-limited as a Republican state senator from Pinellas County, was one of the rare lawmakers who advocated for prison reform in Florida. He says imposing fines and fees on juveniles is self-defeating. If the idea of the system is to change behavior and increase public safety, “it is just one more hurdle” for families to overcome, he said.
A study led by Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminologist tapped last year by President Joe Biden to head the Bureau of Justice Statistics, found an inverse relationship between fees and recidivism, meaning that cases in which fees were imposed more frequently led to the juvenile re-offending. “Fees have an adverse reaction on youth,” Piquero said bluntly. And they also have an adverse reaction on the finances of the state, according to Sarah Couture, Florida director of The Fines and Fees Justice Center. The Juvenile Law Center also is working on the project. She says fines and fees are an unreliable revenue source for the state, and are “largely non-collectible, which results in Florida wasting time and money chasing money that does not exist to begin with.” She says the justice system, including county court clerks, public defenders, and prosecutors, should be paid through general revenue, not fines and fees on juveniles and their families.
The study, which looked at fees and fines in the juvenile system and compared them among different groups, also found that Black and Hispanic youths were assigned higher fees than their white counterparts who were also fined.
Black youths in Florida have an average fee of $709.50, while white youth have an average fee of $426.50 and Hispanic youth have an average of $633.33, according to the University of Miami Study, which analyzed data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. Marq Mitchell is familiar with the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, both as a youth who was in its programs and now as an advocate who runs an organization called Chainless Change that “supports returning citizens to heal from contact with the criminal legal system.” It also equips people with arrest records to engage in community organizing. When he was a child, Mitchell’s mom and grandmother could not care for him, so he bounced from one foster family to another. When he was 10, the Department of Children and Families sent Mitchell to a psychiatric facility called Manatee Palms to treat his challenging behaviors. Mitchell remembers being restrained in his bed and having his meals slid to him through the door. His grandmother couldn’t afford to bring him underwear, so he would use scissors to cut the waist so they would fit, he said.
Each time he had a court date, he said, Mitchell would be excited as he got dressed, because the courthouse was the one place he could see his grandmother. Mitchell also hoped that his judge would release him back to his grandmother, which always left him disappointed. Each time this happened, he would lash out, scream and throw things. Eventually, he said he was transferred to a juvenile detention center where, he said, “everyone was bigger than me, but my mouth was bigger than them.” His grandmother died while he was in detention. After years in and out of the juvenile and adult justice systems with no money to pay his own fines and no family members to help him pay, he is still paying off fines and fees from his incarceration. These fines have resulted in him having his driver’s license suspended, and have also made it more difficult for him to find a place to live. The fines, Mitchell said, “resulted in me having my license suspended, showed up on my credit report, and made it even more difficult for me to get housing.”
Professionally, as the leader of Chainless Change, he says having unpaid fines and fees have prevented him from getting state certification to be a mentor for youth recovering from mental illness and drug addiction.
He says his unpaid court debt also has made it so he cannot get Medicaid funding that would support his nonprofit of nine employees. As a 32-year-old, even after failed attempts to petition the court to convert his fines and fees to community service or get them reduced, he owes about $7,000 to the adult and juvenile justice systems. That debt is now with collection agencies, though Mitchell says he can’t be precise about what he owes and to whom because such information often is opaque. “I’m an attorney and even I have trouble finding out how much people owe,” said David Piña, a legal advocate and former public defender who says most of his work involves representing clients seeking reinstatement of their licenses. Miami-Dade Public Defender Carlos Martinez is against collecting fees from children and families he represents — even fees that are intended to support the work of his office. He says it is not worth the effort in trying to collect the money from families already struggling to make rent, pay bills, and keep their families intact.
“You’re making a situation worse rather than trying to address the harm that was done by that child,” Martinez said.
“If this is an ineffective punishment that actually causes more harm to the public with further victimization by new arrests, why are we going to continue doing this?” he asked. In Miami-Dade County, the total fees and fines imposed often do not exceed $200. But, said Martinez: “$200 is in fact a big deal when many of the parents of our children are already struggling financially.” Judges usually leave it up to parents and their public defenders to raise the question of fines and fees during the initial disposition hearing. Under Florida law, judges are technically unable to relieve or waive court fines and fees, or convert fees to community service. The new legislation being considered would give them that discretion.
Some judges do it anyway, and will ask a youth’s parents if they have the ability to pay. Judge Prescott is one such judge. At the Miami-Dade Children’s Courthouse during a recent hearing, Prescott asked the mother of a juvenile: “How many mouths do you have to feed and put food for on the table?” She responded: Nine. The judge waived the fees and fines.
