As a teen, Delvin Reddick faced a choice between pursuing a degree in social work or hitting pause on his education to pay off court debt stemming from a theft charge.
The court levied fines, fees and restitution against Reddick that he says equaled what his tuition would be to attend the Community College of Allegheny County.
He decided to put off school but paying the court-ordered fines and fees couldn’t happen overnight. And, when he turned 18 and was still chipping away at his debt, the court transferred the case to his adult record — a consequence that haunted him for the next decade.
Advocates say many Allegheny County residents have had their lives upended by financial consequences of acts they committed in youth.
House Bill 1381, which passed the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee in September, could change that.
The bill, introduced by state Rep. Dan Miller, D-Mt. Lebanon, and based on recommendations from a bipartisan Juvenile Justice Task Force, proposes reforms to the juvenile justice system, including the elimination of court fines and fees and limits on restitution. Miller, a former public defender, said youth in the justice system often face fines they and their families cannot afford, placing excessive stress on them.
The financial obligations that courts can levy against youth include restitution to the victim, fines and fees. Joseph Asturi, a spokesperson for the Allegheny Courts, said the Allegheny County Juvenile Court only levies fines and fees required by law. These amounts are paid to the government and can be used to fund the costs of running the legal system, previous PublicSource reporting found. While fines are punitive, both fines and restitution aim to hold youth accountable, Asturi said.
In 1995, Pennsylvania revised the purpose clause of the Juvenile Act to emphasize community safety, accountability and rehabilitation. Advocates and legislators behind HB 1381 argue that for youth, financial consequences often feel disproportionate to their offense, rather than rehabilitative.
Reddick said he experienced instability as a young person — both at home and at school. His mother died and he lived with his grandparents for some time before living in a foster home with six other children. He changed high schools three times over three years. He experienced symptoms of anxiety, depression and anger management, but didn’t receive consistent treatment or therapy. He developed a pattern of stealing, be it cash from his grandparents’ stash or trendy clothes from a store to resell.
Eventually that landed him in juvenile court, face-to-face with financial consequences he didn’t understand.
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The court put Reddick, now 31, on a monthly repayment plan. He was put on probation, given a curfew and weekly check-ins with his probation officer. He missed payments; he recalls thinking that if he met all the other requirements and paid when he could that it would just work itself out. But those missed payments eventually marred his adult record.
“It was a double jeopardy and it kind of forced my hand for years down the road,” he said.
‘Ask them why’
Advocates say there is a missing link between what children are made to pay the court and what they are being punished for.
Kathi Elliott, chief executive officer of Gwen’s Girls, a community-based organization working to divert Black girls from the justice system, said the practice of fining youth is merely “punitive in nature” and fails to instruct them.
Like Reddick, a young person may lack clarity on what or who they are paying back, especially when the amount they are saddled with is significantly more than what they stole, Elliott said. In non-theft cases, that becomes further muddled.
Many young people have said they received an outsized response to youthful offenses, according to Pittsburgh Foundation Vice President for Community Partnerships Michael Yonas, who has interviewed adjudicated youth in nine years with the philanthropy.
“The vast majority of what young people do — if not the majority, if not all of it — is probably just developmentally appropriate behavior,” Yonas said. “All the young people we talked to recognize that they had done something wrong; they just really consistently shared that everything that happened after that was so disproportionately impacting them compared to what they had done.”
Research has shown that criminal involvement tends to peak during adolescence but then falls.
The behaviors that youth get in trouble for are often “symptoms of something deeper in their lives,” Yonas said. Sometimes, he said, a young person might have been getting good grades and working toward college or a career before factors beyond their control, such as homelessness, financial problems or family difficulties, threw them off course. “No one asked them,” Yonas said. “They wanted adults to ask them why, not just punish them.”
Sometimes court debt also falls on the family of the accused child. Nadia Mozaffar, a senior attorney at the Juvenile Law Center, recalled speaking with a mother who had to get on food stamps because she was paying for her child’s fines and fees. These commitments often require “a sacrifice of other necessities,” Mozaffar said.
The financial burden that fees and fines can place on a young person’s caregivers impacts their ability to care for that child and any others they may be responsible for, according to Bianca van Heydoorn, executive director of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project. This, she said, can have long-term consequences in terms of health and education.
Court fines and fees generate important revenue. But for some people, they’re an insurmountable hurdle.
Stories about how court fines and fees deepen poverty and entangle people in the legal system.
“It’s not an actual sanction towards a young person,” van Heydoorn said. “It’s a sanction to their families who more often than not are not in a position to be able to pay those fines and fees.”
According to a 2021 report by the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Procedure Rules Committee, around 70% of cases closed in 2019 had fines, fees and costs imposed. Of those, around 10% were not paid in full when they closed, prompting the conclusion that the majority of financial obligations imposed on youth were not excessive.
‘The level of justice that you can afford’
Juvenile justice involvement disproportionately impacts youth of color. Black girls in particular are 13 times more likely to be arrested by Pittsburgh police than white girls, according to a 2019 report by the Black Girls Equity Alliance. Serious offenses make up 25% of arrests for both Black and white girls, the report states.
Over the last decade, Pittsburgh Public Schools has moved away from a “zero-tolerance” policy — which ensured any student caught fighting in school, regardless of the circumstances, would be referred to the juvenile justice system. But Pennsylvania’s law leaves room for interpretation among districts. In 2017, Allegheny County schools referred Black girls to the juvenile justice system 50% more than the nationwide average.
Many of these referrals are for low-level offenses that typically get resolved at the magisterial court level with fines. Unpaid fines, however, are considered contempt of court and can get a case “kicked up” to Juvenile Court, said Christopher Lin, an attorney at the Juvenile Law Center.
Enforcement varies widely across the state. In 2018, 16 counties in Pennsylvania did not send any youth to juvenile court for unpaid fines. But, contempt of court charges prompted by unpaid fines accounted for at least 20% of juvenile court filings in 24 counties, including Allegheny County. According to the task force report, 13% of those youth remain under court supervision until they age out at 21.
“You get the level of justice that you can afford,” van Heydoorn said. “That isn’t justice being blind.”
Recidivism and escalation
During his late teens and early adulthood, Reddick worked several jobs instead of going to college. From working in warehouses and construction to customer care, Reddick felt like he was caught in another bind: maintaining his freedom by paying off his court debt while providing for his girlfriend and first child. In 2015, he fell back into involvement with the justice system and learned that because his juvenile case was now on his adult record, the consequences of an additional theft charge were escalated, he said.
In that adult case, the court assessed him a total amount nearly triple the restitution owed to the victim.
Unpaid court debt can affect individuals and communities differently.
A 2016 study funded by the Juvenile Law Center found that non-white youth in Pennsylvania were more likely than white youth to owe fees and restitution when their case closed and that continued debt increased the likelihood of recidivism.
A new Gwen’s Girls initiative aims to reduce juvenile justice referrals in Allegheny County
Mozaffar said probation and other forms of court involvement, including debt, place a level of scrutiny on behaviors that are “not otherwise criminal,” which can reinvolve youth in the system.
Unpaid court debt remains in the system and may show up on someone’s record, which can escalate interactions with a police officer or preclude them from certain jobs and housing, Elliot said.
According to Asturi, judges must explain any restitution or fines ordered, along with the corresponding payment schedule, during juvenile court proceedings. Probation officers “closely monitor” payment collections, which have to be completed before the court can close a juvenile case, he wrote.
Outlook for HB 1381
The push to eliminate court costs for Pennsylvania youth has some bipartisan support. Still, some concerns swirl around potential loss in court revenue and alternative consequences for low-level offenses.
Lower courts that handle minor law violations often “only have fines as an option for a disposition,” said Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice. “Removing the ability to impose a fine, however, leaves these courts with few options for imposing some level of consequence for a law violation such as minor in possession of a substance.”
Hurst said some courts across the country have expressed concern over how else to administer consequences that do not involve a youth in placement or the juvenile court.
But with many youth not recognizing a fine as a related and proportionate consequence of their action, advocates like Yonas and Elliott suggest that courts should deploy a more expansive and rigorous use of diversion programs — an approach outlined in the pending bill. A diversion program could include work experience and opportunities for youth to do something meaningful and restorative, Yonas said.
Advocates of the bill question the court’s reliance on fees applied to youth and caregivers and maintain its provisions could reduce costs for the legal system. The task force estimated that if all of their recommendations are implemented, the courts would save $81 million.
Across Allegheny County, unpaid court debt dating back decades racks up in the hundreds of millions. Even more has likely accrued from youth cases, according to Yonas, raising doubts around how much fines and fees really contribute to court costs. “There's some people that have court fees and fines that are owed to the system for 40 years,” Yonas said. “They probably couldn't pay them then. They certainly can’t pay them now.”
Reddick said he paid off his juvenile case at 27, more than a decade after he was charged. He re-enrolled in CCAC two years after that, collecting his associate’s degree in December 2023. He now works as a youth support partner with teens, but is looking for better-paying work to support his family and further his education.
When he considers the proposed changes to the law, he imagines how different his life could have looked. As a kid, he had dreams of becoming a teacher, like his grandmother, or a firefighter, or making it to the NBA. He felt like the decade he spent working through his debt robbed him of the opportunity to explore his interests.
He has, though, found applications for his hard-learned lessons.
“I love the gratification from helping youth,” Reddick notes. “We often find common ground because I understand where they are coming from, what they are going through, and I am still faced with the same economic disparities as some of their families.”
Miranda Jeyaretnam is an editorial intern at PublicSource and can be reached at miranda@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Delaney Rauscher Adams.
