How Michigan Stopped Saddling Children with Millions in Court Debt

By the time Arrianna Jentink-Bristol paid off the $800 she owed in court debt, it was six months before her 18th birthday, and she had spent nearly the entirety of her teenage years on probation. Jentink-Bristol first entered Michigan’s juvenile justice system when she was 13 after getting into a physical fight with her mother, who she said was intoxicated and punching her three-year-old sister in the face. She remembered being subsequently detained and assigned a public defender who didn’t show up for one of her hearings. Following the arrest, Jentink-Bristol picked up another charge. She cycled through the juvenile justice system for two years and was detained in juvenile facilities, a mental hospital, and put on house arrest and probation, all while her bills continued to stack up. 

Jentink-Bristol could’ve gotten off probation at 15 had she paid off her fines and fees. But her probation officer told her that she had to remain under supervision until she cleared her debt, which included the cost of her public defenders, stays in detention, and restitution to the victims of her crimes. Jentink-Bristol no longer had a relationship with her mother and couldn’t afford to pay. Her job at an ice cream shop for six hours a week making $10 an hour was just enough to buy her own food and necessities, with nothing left over for her debts. 

Remaining on probation for an extra two years came with consequences. She had to get the court to sign off on a robotics class she wanted to take that ended after her nightly curfew. She wasn’t allowed to attend public school with the kids she grew up with and instead had to go to a school for kids who had been arrested.

The experience left Jentink-Bristol feeling anxious, depressed, and confused. “I had my mom yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. I had the court yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. As a kid, you don’t know what the heck is going on,” Jentink-Bristol, now 19, told Bolts. 

She was finally able to pay off her debt after she was given a stipend for participating in a university program where she shared her story. Jentink-Bristol wanted to make sure that other kids didn’t have to go through the same problems. As part of the program, she teamed up with other children, advocates, and politicians to craft a series of bills to eliminate most fines and fees for juveniles in Michigan altogether. 

The bipartisan legislation that Jentink-Bristol helped inspire passed in December 2023 and was recently enacted, on Oct. 1. Under the legislation, children are still responsible for paying restitution to victims, but courts are no longer allowed to charge kids for costs related to their proceedings, such as the cost of court-appointed counsel or detention, two categories that account for the majority of court fees. 

The bills also apply retroactively, clearing any previous debt kids and their families accrued in the juvenile justice system and forbidding judges from jailing children because of court debt or refusing to participate in community service. 

With the enactment of the bill, Michigan became the latest of 17 states to abolish most fines and fees for kids, and one of 10 to do so since 2021. The move is part of a national shift to alleviate children and their families from being saddled with debt that is not only costly to families and their kids, but also local governments who rarely recoup the majority of the costs. Advocates say the state still has to do more work to create a fairer juvenile justice system, however, and are pushing legislation that would improve public defense for kids during the lame duck legislative session ending on Thursday. 

“It was very relieving because I do have younger sisters… say they get wrapped up in that [system], they won’t be going through as much pain in a struggle as I was,” said Jentink-Bristol. “If that had happened while I was going through it, it would have saved me so much pain and suffering.”

While the proposal to eliminate fines and fees for children was first introduced in 2021, it didn’t gain traction until the following year, when a statewide task force formed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer released a report on its investigation into the juvenile justice system. The task force found that youth were being charged attorney fees, which in turn resulted in them waiving their right to counsel or pleading out quickly to avoid bigger bills. As of 2019, the report found, kids and their families, who were also on the hook for the debt, owed a median of $850 dollars for reimbursement costs such as out-of-home placement, evaluation, and treatment; roughly one in ten kids paid more than $1,000, according to the report. 

The panel also noted that the system disproportionately targeted Black kids. They were detained at a rate of six times the rate of white youth, and Black children stayed an average of seven days longer, sticking them with costly fees for each day. Members of the task force unanimously recommended that the state eliminate all fees and court costs except for restitution and payments to a fund for crime victims. 

Jennifer Peacock, policy director at the Michigan Center for Youth Justice (MCYJ), told Bolts that many families were unable to pay for their kids’ court debt and faced consequences such as garnishments on their wages and tax returns. Judges could set a bench warrant for a kid’s arrest if they didn’t show up to a hearing about their payments. Often, as in Jentick-Bristol’s case, they couldn’t get off probation until they cleared their debt, said Peacock. 

“They’re going to stay in the system for longer, potentially deepening their involvement. Maybe they drop out of school to get a job. All of these things we see happen,” she said. “It’ll really harm the whole family unit.” 

Prior to the passage of the legislation, some counties in Michigan experimented with getting rid of most fines and fees kids face in the youth justice system. Among them was Macomb County, a Republican-leaning county neighboring Detroit that took action in 2021 after debating the consequences of its fine system on children. 

The county had charged families $11.7 million in fines and fees between 2017 and 2019, according to a report by MCJY. They were the highest numbers reported in the state. One father, for example, racked up $100,000 in debt because of his child’s arrest. The county was collecting very little of that debt, however. MCYJ researchers found that Macomb County was still waiting for $92 million in debt to be paid back. From 2015 to 2019, the county’s collection rate was just 7.2 percent. 

The impact on families was devastating. Youth justice researchers spoke with 21 families in Macomb County with an average of $87,000 in court debt. Among them, one parent said she had her state tax refund garnished for 10 years and still had $67,000 in debt after her son spent less than a year in detention more than a decade ago. The county offered options to help alleviate debt, such as a deferral for families who fall under the federal poverty guidelines, but the process to do so was often disjointed and arduous. 

Nicole Faulds, the county’s juvenile court administrator, told Bolts that county leaders recognized that the system needed an overhaul when MCYJ approached them with their findings. “I think to see the hard numbers was a good thing. I don’t think we really had a full understanding until we saw that,” said Faulds. “This really demonstrated that we aren’t collecting a lot of money, and it’s a hardship to the people that we deal with.”

A county judge in May 2021 abolished fines and fees for juveniles and discharged all outstanding debt kids and their families had accrued. County commissioners got on board after they saw the harm the bills had on families and weighed the high cost of collecting against the low collection rate, said Faulds.

Since then, Faulds said, the county’s juvenile justice division hasn’t faced any budget cuts because of the move away from fines and fees. She added that she’s noticed that more families are willing to work with the department now that money isn’t a factor. “We’re able to just provide services without having to have parents weigh the cost or be concerned about that down the road,” she said. “They’re not worried about every time they have to come to court that they’re going to have to pay for their child’s attorney if they have a court appointed attorney.” 

Faulds testified in the legislature last year in favor of scaling up her county’s reform statewide, and eliminating fines and fees for Michiganders in the youth justice system. 

Nationwide, state politicians have been increasingly open to abolishing fines and fees for kids. In 2023, Texas became the first southern state to get rid of all juvenile court fees. Arizona passed a bill the same year eliminating juvenile fees and created a process through which youth and their families could ask for forgiveness on outstanding debts. This year, Washington legislators greenlit a bill to waive remaining court debt after passing legislation in 2023 that abolished all fines and fees. And other campaigns are underway to pass legislation similar to Michigan’s, such as Pennsylvania.

Amy Borror, senior youth policy strategist at The Gault Center, a national youth justice advocacy organization, said that the issue caught the attention of criminal justice reform philanthropists who gave money to campaigns to end youth court debt. Once the issue was in front of lawmakers, Borror said they were receptive to passing legislation, largely because they hadn’t ever considered how much kids had to pay. 

“Lawmakers, the general public, are not aware that children were in juvenile court with, in some states, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt,” she said. “Once they learn that, policymakers often are very open to making changes. A lot of these kinds of issues happen without people even knowing that they’re going on.”

As Michigan advocates cheer the enactment of the legislation, they’re also pushing the passage of another reform to improve juvenile defense in the state. The bipartisan bill, House Bill 4630, would bring juvenile defense into the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission, a statewide agency that currently oversees public defense for adults. Under the commission’s umbrella, the agency would create standards for lawyers working on children’s cases aimed at ensuring that they’re consistently providing quality representation. 

Both legislative chambers have passed a version of the bill, the House in October and the Senate just last week. But they need to reconcile their versions by the end of the legislative session, which ends on Dec. 19. 

Currently, there are no statewide standards for juvenile indigent defense and each county is responsible for determining funding and how it assigns lawyers to those cases, meaning that sometimes kids are appointed lawyers who have no experience working with children, said Peacock of MCYJ. “This bill is just key to make sure that these young people are having some consistency,” she said. “When is counsel being appointed? How qualified are they in public defense? And also, are they even familiar with working with young people?”

Greg, a youth mentor who was formerly involved in the juvenile justice system, recounted to Bolts his own experience with public defenders when he was a kid. He was arrested for the first time at age 11 after he stole a bike from Kmart so he could fit in with the other kids in his neighborhood. He was detained for two weeks over the charge. He also had to pay for a court appointed lawyer, who Greg said pressured him to plead guilty. After his initial charge, he estimated that he picked up 15 more charges in the juvenile justice system as he kept committing crimes to bring in money for his family and to make a dent in his court bills, which amassed to more than $10,000. 

Now 30, Greg, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because he feared professional repercussions, told Bolts that his court appointed lawyers didn’t explain the legal process and its accompanying fees to him and his family. “They was asking me all these damn questions,” he recalls, “And all they were saying is guilty, guilty, guilty. Let’s plead out.”

“The 11 year old in me didn’t have a clue.”