In 2016, I began examining juvenile detention in Contra Costa County. When I found that 50% of the girls and 25% of the boys were being held on nothing more than a misdemeanor, officials doubted my finding; misdemeanor bookings were the exception, not the rule, they said. I knew the analysis was right, so I dug deeper to see how a child who had done nothing more than swipe a pair of earrings could end up in juvenile hall again and again.
What did I find? An unexamined system of siloed decisions turned a teenager’s mistake into a cascade of consequence. An arrest, not a warning. Indefinite court supervision, not a limited term of probation. As a result, Contra Costa County was spending $143,445 per child, per year, to lock up kids for things like shoplifting, and charging their parents for it.
All the while, Probation was billing families when their children were held in juvenile detention or on electronic monitoring. Using the department’s own account records, I showed that the fees were unlawful, that most of the debt would never be collected, and that the County spent 76 cents to collect every dollar it did. Families had been billed $9.6 million, and 70% of accounts had never paid anything.
The Board of Supervisors suspended the fees in October 2016, repealed them in September 2017, forgave $8.8 million in uncollectible family debt that December, and in January 2018 began issuing refunds to families the County had wrongfully charged.