Ending Fees and Fines for Juvenile Offenders is Best for Rehabilitation

A former chief judge of Delaware's Family Court argues that imposing fines and fees on juvenile offenders undermines their potential to become productive, law-abiding adults.

I was a judge and chief judge of Delaware's Family Court for over 17 years. In those roles, I held trials and oversaw plea agreements where I was required to order youths under 18 to pay fines and fees that ended up pushing them deeper into the criminal justice system when they inevitably did not pay. I have thus seen firsthand the problems that court-imposed financial obligations create for young people and their families who are often already struggling financially.

During my tenure and with my support, Delaware began to move away from imposing financial penalties in juvenile Family Court proceedings. I am proud that in 2023, Delaware joined a growing number of states and jurisdictions when we passed into law major reforms to our criminal legal system's financial obligations, including eliminating fines and fees for our young people in Family Court. Delaware Family Court judges are not only not required to impose fines or fees as a penalty for children found delinquent; they are no longer permitted to do so.

Delaware is known as the "First State," but we were not the first state to make these changes. We are one of eight states to eliminate all fines and fees in juvenile cases, joining Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. A dozen others have made strides toward this goal, including Arizona, Louisiana, South Dakota, Texas, and others who eliminated all fees, but not all fines, for adjudications of delinquency.

In fact, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization of state legislators dedicated to limited government, free markets, and federalism, adopted model legislation in August 2023, urging more states to eliminate all fees, fines, or other financial obligations (other than restitution) against minors in criminal or juvenile proceedings.

As a judge, I took my role of enforcing personal accountability seriously—which is why I support these reforms. Children should not be expected to earn wages, and sometimes the children who appeared in front of me were too young to legally do so. When we punish children with financial obligations, it's their families that pay them, if they get paid at all. Children from wealthy families who appeared before me could pay off their cases quickly and would receive record-clearing expungements when the time came.

Children from poor families were not so fortunate, and with their families unable to pay off their court debts, they would often enter adulthood still trying to make monthly payments and still unable to clear their criminal record. A 2016 study co-authored by Alex Piquero, currently director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, finds evidence from a survey "of 1,167 adolescent offenders in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania" to "suggest that financial penalties in general and the sheer amount of financial penalties in particular significantly increase the likelihood of recidivism, even after controlling for relevant demographics and case characteristics."

I also believe in a small, efficient government. A 2019 study from the Brennan Center for Justice that examined 10 counties across Texas, Florida, and New Mexico found that collecting fines and fees is incredibly inefficient. It cost Texas and New Mexico counties, for example, 41 cents of every dollar of revenue they raised from fees and fines to pay for in-court hearings and jail costs alone. One county in New Mexico spent $1.17 to collect every dollar of revenue it raised through fines and fees, losing money through this system.

Before eliminating all fines and fees in 2021, Oregon charged families for the costs of having their children in custody. For fiscal year 2019, Oregon reported that they spent $866,000 to collect $864,000 in such fees. Before California eliminated juvenile fees in 2017, Santa Clara County spent $450,000 to collect just $400,000 in fees in fiscal year 2014-15, according to a March 2017 report from the University of California Berkeley Law's Public Advocacy Clinic. This is government waste at its worst. Eliminating fines and fees for children often has a low fiscal impact (or even savings!) because of how inefficient or wasteful it is for governments to try to collect this money.

Delaware is in many ways a microcosm of the rest of the country. The Mason-Dixon line runs through our state. Northern Delaware is urban and densely populated; southern Delaware is split between sparsely populated agricultural land and more densely housed retired beachcombers. If Delaware can make these reforms, any state in this country can, and I urge them to join us in doing so. Our court system is meant to require accountability and rehabilitation. Fines and fees stand in the way of that. Eliminating them levels the playing field while clearing the way for American youth to concentrate on their education and flourish.