The long reach of juvenile and criminal legal debt: How monetary sanctions shape legal cynicism and adultification

Abstract

Previous research has established the deleterious long-term effects of juvenile legal system involvement such as increased risk of criminal legal system involvement as adults. This paper examines retrospective accounts of how that process occurs by exploring the following research question: how does one’s involvement in the juvenile legal system, which includes monetary sanctions, shape peoples’ views of law and legal institutions and with what consequences? Based on 19 interviews with adults who have legal debt from both juvenile and criminal legal systems, the paper focuses on four aspects of the long-reaching effects of juvenile legal involvement and juvenile monetary sanctions: legal socialization, adultification, legal cynicism, and future aspirations. In all these aspects, we show the organizational constraints that shape individuals’ perspectives about the law and the impact of monetary sanctions on their lives. In doing so, the paper shows how monetary sanctions associated with juvenile cases add to the cumulative disadvantage of legal system involvement.

I. Introduction

Research and public attention have examined the criminal legal punishment practice of monetary sanctions which are the sentencing of fines, fees and surcharges to people making contact with local and state courts (Harris 2016; Shannon et al., 2020; Harris, Pattillo, Sykes 2022; Menendez et al. 2019; Shaer 2019). Much of this work has centered on illustrating the legal, social, and community-level consequences of this sentencing practice on adults and their families (Boches et al. 2022; Cadigan and Kirk 2020; Huebner and Giuffre 2022; O’Neill, Kennedy and Harris 2022; Stewart et al. 2022). Less attention is given to children who accrue fines and fees in the US juvenile legal system for a variety of aspects of the process, such as the costs for their public defender; stays in juvenile hall or long-term residential group homes; monthly probation fees related to supervision, treatment and electronic monitoring; tickets for status offenses (e.g., curfew violations, truancy); and restitution to the victims.¹ While some recent work in this area has focused on the likelihood for recidivism (Piquero and Jennings 2017) and the impact of monetary sanctions on both youth and families’ daily lives and their experiences of procedural justice (Paik and Packard 2019, 2023), none of this research has addressed what happens when youth carry this debt into adulthood.

In this paper we examine the consequences of juvenile legal debt by analyzing the perspectives of adults who had legal involvement when they were children. We examine how our interview respondents discussed the monetary sanctions associated with those juvenile cases. While there are some differences between the juvenile and criminal legal systems pertaining to monetary sanctions, this paper explores how the experience of financial penalties faced by adults and youth overlapped in important ways.² One clear example is that youth’s outstanding monetary sanctions are not forgiven even after the juvenile legal system’s jurisdiction ends after a certain period (typically when the youth turn 25 years old). Furthermore, youth who are sentenced to monetary sanctions in the juvenile system experience similar legal, economic, and social consequences as adults who are sentenced to monetary sanctions in the criminal legal setting. Our focus here is to examine what it meant to people to be saddled with legal debt so early on in life, beyond the previously studied issues of long-term financial debt and impacts on recidivism. In particular, we analyze the following four social psychological aspects: legal socialization, adultification, legal cynicism, and future orientation.

The outline of the paper is as follows. After a brief literature review of the long-term consequences of juvenile legal system involvement, legal socialization, and adultification, we turn to our data analysis to examine the four aspects of the enduring effects of juvenile legal system involvement. First, we begin by exploring how people talked about learning what the juvenile legal system was, based on how it treated them at such an early age. Second, we show how early juvenile court contact sped up the participants’ maturation process, having to become “adults” very early in life. Third, we examined the ways that these initial experiences in the juvenile legal system shaped interviewees’ perceptions towards the criminal legal system. Finally, we discuss participants’ descriptions of their future orientation about their lives, both related to the criminal legal system and their social mobility.

In sum, our analysis illustrates how the practice of sentencing children to monetary sanctions intensifies and exacerbates the consequences of juvenile legal system contact well into adulthood. The fiscal weight of fines and fees on young people, at least perceived by those carrying it, sets many on a path towards lives of precarity, stress, and cynicism.

2. Literature Review

Juvenile Legal System

Research on the long-term impact of juvenile legal system involvement has largely centered on two general outcomes that shape the youth and their families’ social mobility: 1) increased risk of involvement in the criminal legal system or other social control institutions and 2) educational achievement. In terms of criminal legal system involvement, Eggleston and Laub’s (2002) meta-analysis of 15 longitudinal studies using official records found that a higher percentage of juveniles who committed crime (average of 54%) also committed crime as adults compared to youth who did not engage in criminal behavior; however, in terms of raw numbers, the latter category is equal. Others explored variations to which groups of justice-involved youth are more at risk of continued entanglement with the criminal legal system. Both Aizer and Doyle (2015) and Eren and Mocan (2021) found youth who spent time in juvenile correctional facilities had an increased rate of recidivating as adults, with the latter study qualifying those findings to address variations in which types of criminal offenses (e.g., drug versus property; violent versus nonviolent) as well as the individual juvenile court judges’ dispositions. Some studies analyzed gender-specific variations in recidivism, doing longitudinal studies of boys’ delinquent behaviors and desistance (Sampson and Laub 2003; Ezell and Cohen 2005) or pathways of offending for girls (Colman et al. 2009).

Regarding the relationship between the juvenile legal system and other social control institutions, Goodkind et al. (2020) found that among youth with juvenile legal placements, those who also had child welfare involvement had twice the odds of spending time in jail compared to youth with no child welfare involvement. Elsewhere, Colman et al. (2010) found that a number of youth who were placed in New York correctional facilities (53% of girls and 16% of boys) end up with cases in the child welfare and criminal legal systems as perpetrators of child maltreatment between ages of 16 and 28.

Some of these studies address the negative impact of juvenile legal system involvement on their educational outcomes, as measured by rates of absenteeism, discipline issues, lower grades, and risks of not graduating high school. Research has found that youth placed in juvenile legal facilities are less likely to finish high school (Aizer and Doyne 2015; Eren and Mocan 2021). Reasons for that outcome could be related to the amount of effort as rated by teachers (Siennick and Staff 2008) or the youth’s age and frequency of delinquent behavior (Ward and Williams 2015). Yoon et al. (2021) took a more nuanced look at educational outcomes beyond graduation rates, finding that youth who experienced juvenile legal system contact had higher odds of grade failure and chronic absenteeism (2.63 and 4.26 times respectively), compared to youth with no involvement. Regarding gender and racial differences among youth involved in the juvenile legal system, Yoon et al. (2021) found that Black boys had worse academic outcomes, followed by Black girls, in comparison to their White counterparts. Finally, Lopez Aguado’s qualitative study (2018) provides a more detailed understanding into the processes by which these outcomes manifest as youth feel stigmatized even in schools with ‘wraparound services’ trying to help them adjust upon release from juvenile correctional facilities.

While demonstrating the impacts of youth’s involvement in the juvenile legal system related to increased risk of criminal legal involvement and lower educational attainment, this research has not addressed the consequences of the financial costs to that involvement, in the form of monetary sanctions. This paper seeks to fill that gap, calling attention to the financial and non-financial implications of being saddled with such significant monetary penalties at a young age.

Legal socialization/cynicism

This paper also draws on previous work on legal socialization and cynicism.³ Legal socialization, a concept originally found in work from the 1970s (Tapp 1976; Tapp and Levine 1974), generally refers to the processes by which people develop their own ideas and beliefs of the law, based on their personal or vicarious experiences with it, shaping their sense of obligation to obey those laws (Fagan and Tyler 2005; Fagan and Piquero 2007; Sampson and Bartusch 1998). Much of the current research on legal socialization and youth centers on youth interactions with police (Gau and Brunson 2010; Fagan and Tyler 2005; Hinds 2009; Geller and Fagan 2019), incorporating procedural justice into that approach. Findings show the influence of extralegal factors on variations to the youth’s legal socialization. Fine and van Rooij (2021) talk about personal characteristics (impulsivity, moral foundation), “nonlegal social context” (teachers, parents, social bonds), and legal system factors that shape peoples’ obligation to obey the law.

Specific to race, people of color have less favorable views in general of the system which are further exacerbated and validated through their experiences with police as they tend to be more surveilled and stopped compared to their white peers. Vidal et al. (2017) expanded on this finding to show that the frequency of police contacts mediated that racial difference. Fine et al. (2017) studied racial disparities in legal socialization by exploring the relationship between young mens’ attitudes about the law and rates of arrest and self-reported re-offending over 30 months after adjudication of the first offense. They found that Black men initially were likely to have more negative views of the law compared to their White and Latino counterparts; in addition, while the Black and Latino men who were rearrested reported increasingly negative views, the association between those attitudes and offending lessened over time.

An understanding of youth′s interactions with the police and legal socialization also requires paying attention to school settings, where school resource officers (SROs) are increasingly present. These studies broaden the scope of legal socialization to all youth, not just those whom police stop based on some suspicion of delinquent behavior. For example, Shedd’s study (2015) showed how youth might view the police with less legitimacy, based upon their experiences in seeing or interacting with police in school, and on their way to and from school. Granot, Tyler and Durkin (2021) found that youth′s increased ideas of legitimacy stemming from their experiences with SROs led them to be more likely to engage not just with the SROs but police officers outside the school as well. Kupchik et al.’s study revealed a slightly different finding: while students did perceive the school resource officers as trustworthy based on them being “friendly and approachable” and were more likely to tell them when something happened, the students still distinguished them from “real” police (2020: 411). Kupchik et al. note two problematic implications of this positive legal socialization for youth of color in the school setting: one, the youth would be exposed to a potential conflict between the SROs and police who do not have the same level of training and two, the youth would be internalizing the message that the system is fair to everyone, while being subjected to increased surveillance and profiling both inside and outside of the school.

Another major component of work on legal socialization and procedural justice is legal cynicism. Often viewed as part of legal socialization, legal cynicism has been framed in two different ways: a normative idea that people question whether to obey the law as rooted in a sense of normlessness/anomie (Sampson and Bartusch 1998) or more recently, as a cultural orientation that views the law and legal authorities as illegitimate, unresponsive and ineffective (Kirk and Papachristos 2011).⁴ The research to date has found less procedural justice and more police contact leads to higher rates of legal cynicism, controlling for extralegal factors such as race, gender, class, and behavioral characteristics. Geller and Fagan (2019) use The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (formerly known as the Fragile Families study) sample to analyze how the youth’s personal and vicarious experiences with police in highly surveilled neighborhoods and the intrusiveness of the contact lead to more legal cynicism compared to their counterparts with fewer police contacts; between the personal and vicarious contacts, the former led to more legal cynicism. Similarly, Kaiser and Reisig (2019) found a positive relationship between youth’s experiences of procedural justice and legitimacy (e.g., youth’s views of legal authorities as credible) in their longitudinal study of youth charged with serious offenses; by the same token, they found a negative correlation between procedural justice and legal cynicism (e.g., youth’s views of the application of laws as unfair). Finally, Cavanagh, Fine and Cauffman (2022) study how youth develop legal cynicism, testing police treatment and maternal legal cynicism to find evidence for the former but not latter factor.

This research on legal socialization and cynicism highlights yet another way that racial inequalities persist through juvenile legal system involvement. That is, people of color generally have negative experiences with law – either personally or vicariously – which leads to more negative views of the system. Monetary sanctions add further stress to this association as people start to view their legal system involvement in monetary terms, only fueling their overall sense of it as illegitimate.⁵

Adultification

Finally, this paper draws on research related to adultification, generally viewed as “the process through which an adolescent acquires or assumes behaviors and roles that are typically adult” (Nebbitt and Lombe 2010: 235). Burton (2007) provides a more detailed conceptualization of adultification in which family context and child attributes shape the forms and features of adultification that include precocious knowledge (e.g., child exposed to things not considered appropriate for their age), mentored adultification (e.g., assume adult-like role with limited supervision from adult), peerfication/spousification and parentification (e.g., quasi-parent to siblings/parent). Outcomes of this adultification could be both positive (e.g., leadership, increased confidence, and responsibility) and negative (increased stress, less academic achievement, exposure to delinquent peers).

This concept of adultification has been used to study marginalized youth (poor/youth of color) in a variety of settings: health, homelessness, juvenile legal system (courts, reentry, corrections, probation), sexual violence victims, poverty, urban settings (Nebbitt and Lombe 2010), and refugee/migrant children (Hlass 2020). For example, Schmitz and Tyler (2016) studied adultification among homeless youth, ages 19-21, before and after leaving home: in taking care of younger siblings at home, youth might foster an early sense of independence that after leaving home, puts them at higher risk of homelessness, given that they might face sexual exploitation and teenage pregnancy. In addition, youth of color are seen by others as more adult-like than White youth (Hlaas 2020) prompting their adultification in different ways.

Some criminological research discusses the role of adultification in youth’s desistance efforts. Previous research on desistance has centered on prosocial features in a person’s environment that can initiate “hooks for change” (Giordano et al. 2002: 1000), leading the person to be able to envision a “replacement self’ that is law-abiding, with a clear sense of purpose (Maruna 2001) and “clean dreams” (Harris 2011), or positive future aspirations, that support them in their process of discontinuing engagement in criminal lifestyles. Adultification can hamper youth’s already complicated pathways to desistance. Panuccio and Christian (2019) focus on this issue in their study of young Black men’s reentry experiences; most of their respondents described having to take on adult roles as early as six years old, while facing racial discrimination to do so in legal ways, thus putting them at risk of engaging in criminal activity to provide for their family. Similarly, monetary sanctions could be seen as a negative turning point that serves as an anchor of disadvantage. This may in turn negatively impact young people’s future orientation, which includes the ability to imagine one’s future life circumstances, optimism or pessimism about the future, and feelings of control over one’s future (Steinberg et al., 2009). Monetary sanctions in fact may be what Giordano et al. (2007) views as ‘episodic derailments’ that prevent youth from imagining such dreams.

This research shows how adultification can put youth at risk for greater inequalities as adults, as they take on independent roles such as parenthood and employment before they have garnered life skills (e.g., educational degrees) and overall maturity to handle them. Our paper adds to this literature by studying the role of institutions – namely the juvenile legal system - in this adultification process. That is, youth are thrust into the labor and debt markets sooner than expected, as they have to earn money to pay for their monetary sanctions, either because their families do not have the means to pay, or the parents expect them to do so on their own.

In sum, monetary sanctions are yet another way that the legal system perpetuates and exacerbates broader racial and socioeconomic inequalities, given that poor youth and youth of color are more likely to be arrested and get harsher dispositions as they are propelled further into the system (Mallett 2018). Moreover, these early experiences of legal debt generate legal cynicism, adultification, and diminished future orientations that stretch into adulthood and keep people tethered to the criminal legal system for long periods of time.

3. Methods

The data for this study came from a broader five-year project, the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions, which examined the system of monetary sanctions across eight U.S. states: California, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Texas, and Washington (Harris, Pattillo, Sykes 2022). The aim of the project was to examine the similarities and differences of how fine and fee sentencing varies across and within the states, as well to better understand the consequences to individuals, families, and communities. The broader study examined multiple layers of systems of justice.⁶ Our team included nearly two dozen social scientists with a wide breadth of methodological, theoretical, and substantive expertise. The study methods included court observations of sentencing and sanctioning hearings, averaging 200 hours per site within each state. The research team collected over 950 interviews and surveys with people sentenced to penal debt, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, clerks, and probation officers. In addition, the research included compilations of statewide, multi-year, automated court data from a number of the jurisdictions within and across the states of focus.

This paper relies on a subset of data from the larger project’s 519 interviews with adults sentenced to monetary sanctions. While juvenile fines and fees were not a focus of the larger study, we noticed that people frequently mentioned having involvement in the juvenile legal system. To identify the interviews used for this paper, we text queried for any mention of the following terms: “juvenile,” “kid,” and “young.” We found 34 interviewees in five of the states (California, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, and Washington) who discussed having juvenile legal system involvement. Of those interviews, 19 people in four states (California, Illinois, Texas, and Washington), discussed having been issued fines and fees as a result of that involvement. In terms of the demographics of the 19 interviewees, 63% were male, mean age was 26 years old, with a range of 18-35 years old. In terms of race/ethnicity, 32% identified as non-Hispanic whites, 21% as Black, 26% as Hispanic and 16% identified as other. In terms of educational attainment, 21% indicated they had less than high school, 11% had a high school diploma/GED, 11% had an associate degree, 47% had some college or more, and 11% were not stated.

The following table provides more detailed description of the subset.

State	Gender	Age	Education	Race/ethnicity	Age at first juvenile charge
Texas	Male	26	NA	Black	17
	Female	21	High school	Biracial	17
	Male	24	Some college	Black	13
	Male	18	Less than high school	Black	14
	Female	18	Less than high school	White	14
	Male	31	Less than high school	Latino	14
	Male	NA	Less than high school	Latino	12
	Male	23	Some college	Latino	14
	Female	24	Some college	Latino	14
California	Male	30	Associate degree	White	15
	Male	25	Some college	Middle Eastern	NA
Washington	Male	35	High school	Biracial	NA
	Male	NA	NA	NA	17
	Female	24	Some college	Latino	17
	Female	27	Some college	Black	13
Illinois	Male	29	Associate degree	White	15
	Female	26	Some college	White	10
	Female	31	Associate degree	White	13
	Male	23	Less than high school	White	12

The initial reasons for the juvenile legal involvement ranged from minor tickets and offenses (trespassing, curfew violation, shoplifting, marijuana possession) to more serious offenses for aggravated assault and residential burglary. Their criminal legal involvement also varied with some only having traffic tickets or misdemeanor theft, to others having a combination of those with felony level drug/firearm possession, theft, and assault. As a result of this juvenile and criminal legal involvement, the 19 interviewees reported an average of $15,807 in monetary sanctions (range $195-$111,000); of that, they reported paying an average of $4,430 (range $0-$47,400).

We first coded the 34 interviews to identify how people felt their early legal and fiscal entanglement with the juvenile legal system shaped their life trajectories. As such, we used an initial set of codes that included family-related issues (e.g., intergenerational monetary sanctions, relationships, payment, threats, and consequences of nonpayment), process-related issues (e.g., confusion, information seeking), and records (e.g., electronic, multiple agencies for one case or across cases, multiple systems across cases and jurisdictions). After coding the interviews with this first set of codes, we noticed that in addition to the multiple challenges related to relationships and administrative obstacles, people expressed a significant amount of legal cynicism based on their cumulative experiences which led them to grow up earlier than others and also informed their aspirations as adults. As such, we refocused our analysis on the 19 interviews that specifically mentioned juvenile monetary sanctions to highlight the long-term impact of the financial debt (in addition to the juvenile legal system involvement) on our emerging themes of legal socialization, legal cynicism, adultification, and future outlook. In that process, we wrote in-depth summaries for the 19 interviewees related to those themes.

To ensure intercoder reliability, we all coded the same interview and compared our codes, as well as refined the codes to be used for the rest of the interviews. We then wrote memos related to our themes, from which our data analysis was developed. The aim of our analysis is to theorize the ways the fiscal penalties, along with juvenile legal entanglement, shaped individuals′ orientation to the law, to their roles as adults, and their future orientation towards life.

4. Results

The paper now turns to presenting four mechanisms by which monetary sanctions establish their “long reach” from a youth’s initial contact with the juvenile legal system into adulthood. First, we discuss how youth learn about the law through these contacts that include the monetization of punishment. Then we present findings about the ways that youth enter into an adultification process that often disrupts their life course trajectory as it sets them on for future debt and potential criminal legal system involvement. These factors then shape peoples’ sense of legal cynicism and future orientation as adults.

4.1. Legal socialization

Our analysis shows that youth’s experience with the juvenile legal system shapes their legal socialization, in terms of their interactions with the police and other legal actors. These experiences specifically shape their views in three main ways: 1) the youth learn that the juvenile and criminal legal systems can be harsh and inconsistent; 2) the youth learn how to behave within the juvenile and criminal legal system; and 3) the youth learn they have no power to challenge the system.

In this first example, Julia,⁷ a 24-year-old Latina in Texas, described how her first encounter with the juvenile legal system, a curfew ticket at age 14, taught her the ways that the system can be overly harsh and inconsistent. She said:

I was at a teen night…My mom wasn’t there to pick us up yet, so I was like, “Okay, well, let’s go to Whataburger.” As we were walking to Whataburger, it was my cousin and myself, there was a cop [who said] “You guys are awfully young, what are you guys doing?” [We responded] “Oh, well, we had a teen night and they told us we had to leave.” And then, [the cop asked] “Who told you [that] you guys had to leave?” I was like, “The cops.” [The cop said] “Well they shouldn’t have done that…Okay. Well, you guys are too young to be walking on the street. I’m going to go ahead and give you a curfew ticket.” I was like, “Okay.” They took us to the substation where my mom had to pick us up.

Julia was simply waiting for her mother to pick her up from a social event when two successive interactions with police officers led to escalating consequences. The first set of officers told her cousin and her to leave the social event with no other instructions which led to the second group of officers stopping and taking them to the police station because they were “too young to be walking on the street.” Beyond the inconsistency of this interaction with the officers, Julia also received a $75 curfew ticket from the second officer which her mom had to pay.

Legal socialization can also be more insidious than just learning the system is illegitimate. Some people reported learning how to act within that system in a way that stripped them of their agency. Michael, a 31-year-old Latino man in Texas, discussed how his experience in a juvenile correctional facility for marijuana possession was intense and controlling:

One of the worst times of my life. Because it was really bad, kind of like they try to break you down to the fullest and physical training twice a day. Your room has to be spotless. Like they give you a ruler and everything has to be measured out certain distances. And then they’ll go in there once you have everything nice and neat, they’ll go in there and they’ll be, “What is this? What is this, juvenile? Fix it.” And then they’ll throw it all on the floor for you and you have to just fix it. And that’s like on a regular basis almost until you finally get the hang of it. And yeah, so it was pretty bad…once you get towards the end you start getting used to it. I actually started liking it after awhile. I don’t know why I didn’t pursue the military after that because it was pretty close to it.

Michael learned as a youth that this is the way the system works in which “they try to break you down to the fullest.” While Michael viewed this facility as “one of the worst times of my life” he also noted “towards the end you start getting used to it. I actually started liking it.” While this could be seen as a successful “rehabilitation” of the youth, it is not clear how the time spent the facility built him back up to take ownership of his own life. Rather, we could infer that what he learned instead was to be a passive actor in the face of authority which ultimately did not help him successfully transition to adulthood. For example, he mentioned that he could have applied those skills to the military but does not “know why” he did not. Moreover, he never finished high school and did not stop using marijuana, as he was arrested later as an adult for marijuana possession. Later in the interview, he stated he viewed the system as an adult as “wasting a lot of time and money on petty crime.”

4.2. Adultification

Another way that juvenile legal involvement and its related monetary sanctions lead to long-term consequences is through adultification. That is, the interviewees’ experiences with the juvenile legal system led them to assume adult roles and responsibilities earlier than expected. Participants lost their protected status as minors typically provided to youth under 18 years old. This section details the ways that youth were no longer protected by the juvenile legal system or by their families.

Adultification by the system:

Within the juvenile and criminal legal systems, youth relayed they were treated as “criminals.” For example, youth described being treated as potential suspects rather than innocent children in police interactions. Shawn, a 24-year-old African American man in Texas described his first encounter with police at age 16 that led to an estimated $600 or $700 in court costs and time in adult jail. Shawn and his friends were confronted by a police officer for “disturbing the peace” by dropping a bag of flour from the third floor of a friend’s apartment building. When the officer asked for their names, Shawn said:

My home boy, he starts mouthing him…I get to giving him my name…I’m going to just go get my mom because I don’t feel comfortable. I went to walk off…the fucking guy, man, grabs me by arm…slams me to the ground…he’s on my back, with his knee on my back holding my arm.

The officer’s response indicated to Shawn that he was not a child worthy of protection by the system, but rather a suspect. Shawn continued, “I guess you would call it resisting. He got your hands behind your back and you’re rolling all over the ground, yelling and screaming. So, I guess you would call that resisting arrest.” The charges were ultimately dismissed, but only after Shawn spent three days in the county jail. In addition, Shawn noted during the interview that the $600 to 700 in court costs still appear on his record, even though the charges were ultimately dismissed.

Youth also learned they could not expect protection from the system, as evidenced by their time in youth correctional facilities. Adam’s experience in the California Youth Authority (CYA) illustrates this subtheme. Adam, a 30-year-old White man, spent 5.5 years in the CYA, but did not disclose the reason for that sanction. Adam also spent 78 months incarcerated as an adult for an array of charges, including assault and battery, grand theft auto, embezzlement, grand larceny, and possession/transport of firearms. At the time of his interview, Adam had an open warrant for non-completion of a drug program; he moved away from the county in which he had the warrant and lived “off the grid” in a nearby city. He estimated that he owed $110,000 in monetary sanctions. Adam’s criminal activity appeared to escalate over his lifetime, and he described how his experience in the juvenile prison system transformed him into becoming more violent as a survival tactic:

[My time in CYA] was ten times worse than any adult prison…because you have killer kids who are doing life sentences, the majority of them. Violent, crazy kids…they know that they’re going to adult prison, so they join a gang and they do as much…violence as they possibly can, to earn as much respect…I ran solo. The first two years, I got the shit kicked out of me…I was in the infirmary… every other week…third year came around, I start learning how to bob and weave…started working out, in the day. Started just picking people apart…They left me alone, after that.

Adam’s depiction of the CYA as “ten times worse” than adult prisons signifies his experiences during his youth were salient in shaping his views of the adult and juvenile systems. Firstly, it is telling that he characterizes the youth prison as worse, even though he spent more time in the adult prison. In terms of what he learned there, he saw how youth with life sentences who knew “they’re going to adult prison” did “as much violence as they possibly can, to earn as much respect.” While he tried to avoid that path, he also had to model similar behavior to survive. Adam’s adultification led him to become a more physically strong and aggressive person, asserting his dominance over the other youth before they started fighting with him.

Adultification by family:

Participants denoted how adultification occurred in their families in two ways. First, interviewees said their parents started to see them as “troublemakers” creating undue burdens on the family due to their system involvement, as opposed to a dependent member of the family in need of support and protection from others. Second, some parents did not financially support the youth, leading them to move out of the family home or work from an early age to support themselves. Benji, a 25-year-old Middle Eastern man in California, discussed how he was overcharged in juvenile court for possession of cannabis with the intent to sell. Benji recounted he paid $6,800 in court fees, $2,300 of which pertained to his juvenile case, over the last eight or nine years. Benji also mentioned he owed $52,500 in attorney’s fees for his juvenile case. Initially, his parents did not help him financially because they had doubts about his innocence. Over the two-year period when his parents were not helping him, Benji had to start working to take care of his monetary sanctions, which he characterized as “walking around with a lot of dead weight.” At the age of 17, Benji was paying between $25 and $30 monthly in restitution; he explains it took, “about two years to pay it off… I worked like a dog to pay off every, um, not, as much as the restitution, the 500 bucks…but it was the lawyer fees that killed me.” In consequence, Benji had to delay his plans to attend a 4-year college, starting at a 2-year community college to save money. He explained the ways he paid the debt and the toll it took on him when he said:

At 19 years, 18, 19 years when you’re slapped with $50,000 in debt, um, it’s pretty, it’s a tremendous burden on you…any time I could, I was on Craigslist. I was selling stuff; I was doing fundraisers on campus… I would roll up to, roll up with, like, boxes of, I sell, I sell clothes…candy bars, anything I could.

Benji’s parents’ initial lack of support regarding his case led to his adultification because he had to bear the entirety of his juvenile monetary sanctions starting at age 17 and make difficult decisions about his future to pay them. Whereas other teenagers might be working part-time for spending money or to pay college tuition, Benji had the added burden of having to “sell…anything I could” to keep from getting behind on his court payments and attorney’s fees at a young age. Benji was forced to modify his college aspirations because of the need to pay off his looming legal debt.

Similarly, Diego, a 23-year-old Hispanic man in Texas, felt responsible for handling interactions with the court related to his cases, starting with his first encounter with the police for trespassing around age 14 to 15. Diego also received multiple traffic tickets for driving without a seatbelt and for driving without a light that illuminates the license plate at night, a requirement in many states. He estimated he paid $800 as a juvenile in monetary sanctions related to these cases and that his aunt paid one of his traffic tickets. In the following excerpt, Diego suggested he could potentially have changed the outcome of his cases with more legal knowledge as a youth:

If I knew, yeah maybe. Or maybe not. I was fourteen, my dad didn’t know much law either so… If I would have known basic rights type of shit, I would have been like “Yo, Pop’s just say this, or whatever.” Because I would see a lot of people just walking in, they’d defend themselves just walk out like nothing, because they know the system. They were educated. If I had the knowledge, I would have done things differently, yes.

Diego took on an adult role in that he placed the onus on himself as a 14-year-old child to resolve his case rather than relying on his father to protect him from the system. Diego did not question whether a youth should have knowledge of “basic rights” or that the system should have done a better job explaining such rights to him. Rather, he saw others “defend themselves… because they know the system” and suggested it was his responsibility to know enough about the system to defend himself.

Legal system involvement also facilitates adultification in that it places constraints on how families manage their households. Demar, an 18-year-old African American man in Texas, discussed how his parents moved to another state when he was 14 years old due to legal troubles. He said, “they was just trying to get out of Texas. They had gotten into some troubles. They wanted me to go, and I was like ‘Nah, I ain’t going nowhere.’” His parents’ decision to leave and his decision to stay behind meant that he was left alone to deal with his own legal cases which included monetary sanctions. Demar’s first interactions with the police were related to theft; he was also convicted of a misdemeanor around 15 or 16 years old for smoking cannabis and had juvenile burglary charges, for which he paid $140 in restitution even though he states he “beat the case.” Adding to the already difficult task of dealing with these court cases on his own, he was stuck in a cycle of not being able to transition to adulthood because he was still legally a minor. Around the time his parents moved away, Demar dropped out of school and engaged in informal work (i.e., moving and loading trucks for cash) to pay rent and live in a friend’s aunt’s house. All of this led to him having trouble getting an ID, securing housing, and a job:

Man, it be kinda hard. You gotta have proof of where you’re at. You know what I’m saying? You gotta have an address and stuff. That’s no problem I got the addresses and all that but you gotta have those in your name. You know what I’m saying? And the problem with that is I ain’t got no bills in my name coming there. What are you supposed to do if you don’t have that you’re supposed to bring your parents. My parents live in another state so I can’t do that.

Demar was not considered “adult enough” in the eyes of bureaucracies to establish his own residence or get an ID, which would enable him to seek employment in the formal economy. His juvenile monetary sanctions likely further complicated the process of establishing a residence and getting an ID, given he could not get a job to pay them off. Moreover, his parents’ move led him to have to navigate the juvenile legal system on his own, such as paying restitution for a burglary case even though those charges were dropped.

4.3. Legal cynicism

We found that interviewees’ experiences as youth with the system shaped their views of the law and legal authorities as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ineffective (Kirk and Papachristos 2011). Monetary sanctions factor into this legal cynicism in nuanced ways. While many interviewees viewed the police and criminal legal authorities with cynicism, some did not automatically dismiss the rationale for imposing monetary sanctions. Others articulated how family members’ experiences with monetary sanctions shaped their own views about the legitimacy of the system generally and monetary sanctions specifically.

Monetary sanctions can shape a person’s legal cynicism when they lead that person to view the entire legal system solely within that economic framework. Steve, a 29-year-old White man in Illinois, was charged with residential burglary at 15 years old and was convicted of three felonies, five misdemeanors and a DUI traffic offense as an adult. To date, he paid between $4000-$5000 in fees which included the charges for juvenile and adult probation (both are $20 a day) and electronic monitoring at $7/day. At the time of his interview, he owed a total of over $3,000 in two counties. He was not sure how much was sent to collections. Here is how he described his initial experiences with the legal system while in juvenile court:

When I was a juvenile, they were really on me back then. They were like “we want money, we want money, we want money”…what the judge actually said was that I had to go out and get a job. And then I had to keep all my grades higher than a C average and since I had the job and I was able to keep it ‘cause I was working at McDonald’s, they wanted that money…I was paying them the twenty dollars.

Steve’s recollection of the judge in juvenile court is that he was only focused on the “money” aspect; while he also mentions the court’s insistence that he maintain his grades in school, he mainly remembers the $20 he had to continually pay out of his earnings. There was no mention from Steve of the ostensibly “rehabilitative” features to working (e.g., responsibility, learning the value of money) or to going to school (e.g., furthering education to pursue more opportunities as an adult).

Like Steve, Robert saw all aspects of the legal system geared towards financial gain, extracting capital from people who may be indigent and innocent. Robert, a 35-year-old biracial man (Native American/White) in Washington, had an estimated $10,000-$15,000 in monetary sanctions from both juvenile and criminal legal involvement related to drugs and traffic violations. For at least one of the adult charges, Robert claimed that he was set up by the police who stole $3,500 from him and charged him with more drugs to escalate the initial charge from possession to selling. As a result of these many experiences in both systems, Robert viewed the legal system in this way,

“They give you your court appointed attorney that you can’t afford and then charge you for him anyway. They should be doing it by the person’s income or, you know, how they do it, but they’re not. They want whatever they can get out of anybody…They’re crooked here, the whole system. They don’t care whether you’re innocent or not. They just want their money.”

Robert’s experience in the juvenile legal system contributed to this view, given that the interest from those monetary sanctions kept accumulating into his adulthood where he had to serve time for nonpayment. He paid $2,000 over his lifetime, but that amount did not cover the interest of these monetary sanctions. Even the work of public defenders was called into question as he stated, “the whole system…don’t care whether you’re innocent or not.”

Some of our interviewees did not automatically dismiss the system’s rationale for imposing monetary sanctions. Yet the excessiveness of the monetary sanctions, including the ones given to youth, leads them to question the legitimacy of that process. Consider the case of Julia, discussed earlier in the paper, who received a curfew ticket at 14 years old. At the time of her interview, this 24-year-old Latina in Texas was going to school for an associate degree in medical assisting while also on probation for interfering with an emergency call for a domestic violence incident between her parents. She was taking classes related to that charge and was assessed $725 in fines and fees, for which she had paid $115. She also had to pay a dismissal fee for a traffic ticket for improper insurance and registration. even though the ticket was ultimately dropped when she showed proof of insurance. She described how she viewed these fines and fees:

I’m like, “Okay, yeah, they need to make money, the state needs to make money, but that’s just ridiculous.” People can barely afford to make ends meet and they want to charge ridiculous. Obviously if you’re getting in trouble and you’re coming to probation, I mean, you should’ve thought about that before.

Julia did not seem to question the state’s “need to make money” or the legitimacy of her arrest, even though she was just trying to mediate a family dispute. But she did highlight suspicion about the amount of the monetary sanctions levied for that arrest and where the money is going: “I want to know how much is really going to the state, because obviously people need to get paid for their jobs, but I wish [I knew] where it’s going. How do we know for a fact?”

The youth’s families and communities shaped their orientation to the criminal legal system and monetary sanctions in different ways. Some of our interviewees seemed to express less frustration towards the juvenile and criminal legal systems because their parents (or grandparents) paid off their debts; others seem to have a different life trajectory, filled with cynicism towards the “system” in part because of their parents’ own fraught experiences with monetary sanctions. Regarding the former, consider how Emily, a 26-year-old White woman in Illinois described her experience with the system after her grandparents paid her monetary sanctions:

Emily: I have 13 felony charges out of this county and I’ve had the book thrown at me a significant amount …when I was a juvenile and I had my first felony charge I went in because it was a violation… of your probation to do anything in school that was negative. And I came in and I had just gotten suspended from school for four days for fist fighting… but the funny thing was, I had just, my grandma and my grandpa just gave me $4,000 to pay off all of my court fines [and] because I paid off all my court fines, they let me go early. I wasn’t even supposed to get off probation that day, I wasn’t even eligible, and I was supposed to go to jail. I was supposed to go to the juvenile justice system… they ended up letting me go because they knew I had just paid off all that money…

Interviewer: If that’s not an example of money talks.

Emily: Yeah. It really does and I know for a fact in this county, maybe not so much in surrounding counties, but I do know money talks big time here, especially with me. I’ve never had a consistent job necessarily, so but they know that my grandma and my grandpa have always gotten me out of a pinch.

Emily noted how she received less harsh treatment from the juvenile legal system even though she fully expected a different outcome. As a result, she knew that having money allowed her to successfully navigate the system and avoid incarceration, despite multiple convictions related to drugs and other minor offenses. Notably, she was cognizant of the geographic importance and variation in case processing based on the “county.”

Craig, a 23-year-old White man in Illinois, described family influence on his views in a different manner than Emily. He was on probation since he was 12 years old after four months in secure confinement for aggravated battery with two years of probation for fighting at school (throwing a basketball at a boy). Within a year of the start of probation, he was charged with possession of marijuana and having a firearm on school grounds and went back to juvenile detention for two months followed by five years of probation. In the following interview excerpt, Craig described his father’s orientation to his own monetary sanctions and related incarceration:

Interviewer: How did they deal with it when they had fines and fees?

Craig: They just went into prison. We don’t believe in paying it man. You know.

I mean, like the criminal damage to property I could see paying if I did it. But I didn’t do it. So therefore, I shouldn’t pay for something I didn’t destroy. I go out of here and I get caught with a $20 bag of weed. Then you get me a restitution of $2,000. For what? What am I paying back to? How did I damage you? I didn’t do nothing to you. I didn’t do nothing to the community. What I had in my pocket was mine rightfully. I mean, it didn’t hurt nobody else. So why I got to pay for that? I get why I got to do a couple days in jail. That’s one thing. But why do I got to pay $3,000 for the next three years? On a little bag of weed. It just don’t make sense. That’s how they do it. You get hit with a dime bag of weed. They give you $1,500 fine and two years [of] probation. Then they make you go to counseling and drug rehab and all this. Well, how am I supposed to go to work if you got to go to rehab. Or how you going to go to work if you got to go talk to somebody? How you supposed to be able to pay for gas on the way to work if you’re giving your gas money to stay out of jail? All you’re doing is buying freedom. That’s all you’re doing. It’s not right.

Craig’s legal cynicism was not only based on his own experience, but also on his family members who “went into prison” and “don’t believe in paying.” Even though it is a different pathway, the conclusion that Craig came to is similar to Emily in two ways: one, the system is not about guilt or innocence but rather, to charge people excessive amounts of money and two, the only way to resolve one’s case is by “buying freedom.” Clearly the imposition of monetary sanctions helped to shape the young adults’ cynical perceptions of the criminal legal system.

4.4. Future orientation

Interviewees’ lengthy involvement in the juvenile and criminal legal systems, including monetary sanctions, also shaped their future orientations towards employment, the legal system, and the state more broadly. While one might expect that monetary sanctions certainly hamper peoples’ aspirations towards attaining conventional markers of success, there are some variations in how our interviewees frame those constraints. Yet for all variations, we show how juvenile records (including those related to monetary sanctions) follow people to the point of handcuffing them to the system in ways we have not sufficiently addressed.

For many interviewees, their future orientation largely focused on staying under the radar via the informal economy and unstable housing arrangements in an attempt to go undetected by the criminal legal system moving forward. Robert, also discussed in the previous section, had been homeless for the past four or five months at the time of our interview and was trying to support his three children. Of his employment prospects, Robert said, “I haven’t really worked on the books a lot in my life. It’s always been under the table or for a friend…because of my record.” Similarly, Adam, discussed in the adultification section, described his current work and living situation as essentially working off the books in service jobs (and also credit card scamming). For housing, he paid cash and moved around between friends’ Airbnb and hotel rooms. He did not want to put down roots for fear that the system would find him. All his possessions fit in a backpack, as he described: “credit cards, ID, cash, food, clothes, hygiene, electronics…everybody knows my house, that’s mine, don’t touch it, it’s always by the door…when I find out I had a warrant, I was gone within an hour” Yet at the same time, Adam’s long-term aspirations did not seem too far afield from most people:

“I’m 30 years old. And the only thing I want to do, in my life, right now, is work, be happy, meet a nice girl who’s not gonna shit on me and be abusive…to actually do something cool, or whatever the case may be. And I want to make a family, and just live a normal fucking life.”

Later in the conversation, though, Adam talked about having no credit history, which made it impossible for him to get a house or car, noting, “You’re fucked if you’re a criminal.” Like many others in our sample, these men’s histories in both the juvenile and criminal legal systems have led to them staying in the underground/informal economy as adults. Robert attributes his working off the books mainly due to his record. Adam’s desire to stay invisible reveals a future orientation that goes beyond simply working off the books. Akin to system avoidance (Brayne 2014), Adam structured his life so as to remain undetected by the criminal legal system, such as having a ‘go-bag’ of sorts with all his possessions and did not put his name on any type of trackable system (e.g., lease, credit card statements/history). Yet for both Robert and Adam, their general aspirations were as conventional as any other person, such as taking care of their children or someday having a family. However, their entanglements in the juvenile and adult systems, including monetary sanctions, made it impossible for them to achieve those goals.

In other cases, however, our interviewees revealed that their early experiences with the juvenile system fueled their motivation to pursue conventional aspirations. It is important to note that these examples are not meant to claim that experiencing punishment helped rehabilitate these young people. Rather, they illustrate how participants made sense of their negative experiences with the system. For example, while one might expect Benji who was unfairly arrested as a youth to have a completely negative view of the system and “unplug” like Adam, Benji reported being even more motivated to become a lawyer. He says, “My whole experience with the criminal justice system has left such a sour taste in my mouth that it’s motivated me to go to law school so much to where I have a personal fight to pick.” This notion is in line with Maruna’s (2001) findings that people who desist from crime often use their previous experience with the system to become agents of system change. Similarly, Adriana, a 24-year-old Latina in Washington gleaned motivation from her experiences in the juvenile legal system to create a more positive future for herself and her family.

Adriana: Growing up, I didn’t like cops. I mean, it’s hard to get along with them and whatever. But, I mean, now I’m growing up and I’m seeing now my family does sometimes over act and act stupid. But, you know, they just sometimes torture kids and terrorize them. It affects me ‘cause I’ve seen a lot of crap. So, yeah…

Interviewer: Does it impact your ability to function?

Adriana: It just pushed me harder, wanting to get an education and just show my kids it is tough out here, but you have to just go to school, you know? I’m always pushing them to go to school. Let’s just go to school.

Yet despite these aspirations, both Benji and Adriana face significant administrative hurdles to enacting these plans. In Benji’s case, his college graduation kept getting delayed because he cannot get a legal internship due to his arrest record. That same arrest record is affecting his law school admissions as well as the type of law he’ll be able to practice. Meanwhile, Adriana had her CNA (certified nursing assistant) license delayed for five years due to the lingering effects of a conviction for misdemeanor theft for stealing baby formula from Walmart at age 17. Adriana was charged $200 by Wal-Mart and estimates that she paid over $1,000 in court fines/fees. She also spent time in jail due to failure to pay. She explained, “I barely go into being a CNA ‘cause my theft wouldn’t let me. I had to wait five years. I’m barely doing it a year and a half.” At the time of her interview, Adriana had two children and was staying at her mother’s house because she could not afford a place of her own. That household had a total of 12 people living there; she contributed financially by paying for some of the utilities (e.g., cable and telephone). Her case shows how convictions, records, and debt can follow young people and prevent them from obtaining education and economic stability no matter how motivated they might be to pursue conventional goals.

5. Discussion

The paper’s findings have methodological, theoretical, and policy implications. Methodologically, it provides insights for tracing both the person’s multiple institutional involvements (e.g., juvenile to criminal legal system, agencies within each case or across jurisdictions) and the administrative histories of each monetary sanction which can last beyond the actual cases. Some of our interviewees reported paying part of their monetary sanctions in one office (e.g., probation), only to not have it noted in another agency (e.g., court clerk’s office) which keeps the official record of their payments. Others reported situations like Benji, the 25-year-old in California, who despite having a court minute order saying his case was closed, gets denied an apartment because his arrest record is still available for public searches. That leads to additional time and money trying to clear up his record across multiple jurisdictions (e.g., federal, state) and settings (e.g., court, police, probation). To understand the impact of legal system involvement then is not just to ask people about their experience with the process but also, about how the resulting paperwork follows them in ways that have not been previously considered or studied in great depth.

These empirical insights inform the theoretical implications of our paper which broadens our understanding of the hidden state as diffused across multiple institutions, with sometimes unconnected yet cumulatively serious consequences. That experience often propels the youth and their families into what Paik (2021) has called elsewhere the “multi-institutional maze” that can lead to additional involvements (e.g., child welfare, health, school, social welfare) with increased surveillance in family home (see also Fong 2020). Even seemingly less punitive diversionary programs or social service-focused agencies can unwittingly lead to more punitive outcomes (Brydolf-Horwitz & Beckett 2021). Having to navigate this web of institutions can add to the youth’s adultification as they manage both the financial implications and the many competing agency requirements for compliance. While it can be challenging, if not impossible, for adults to navigate these systems successfully, adolescent youths are at even more of a disadvantage, as they are not completely independent of their families yet are being held to some expectations (financial or otherwise) that suggest they are independent. As such, our analysis adds a new layer to the idea of “episodic derailments” (Giordano et al. 2007), showing yet another “negative turning point” (Giordano 2022) in the form of monetary sanctions.

On a policy note, this research provides added rationale to reform efforts particularly around monetary sanction in the juvenile legal system. By showing the multi-faceted consequences of imposing such financial punishments on youth and families, the imperative for reform is more than just preventing a lifetime of debt for the youth: it shapes their view of the law and prospective views of the future. That call for reform is being heard across the United States as several states have eliminated at least some fines and fees in the juvenile legal system. Most recently, the US Department of Justice issued a Dear Colleague letter advocating for more states and jurisdictions to follow suit, in addition to recognizing at the very least that states adopt a presumption of indigence guidelines for children/youth in the juvenile legal system. At the same time, it is important to critically assess what those reforms yield or how they are implemented in practice. For example, the system-level effects need to be considered if the state does not adequately fund agencies who did rely on monetary sanctions to pay (at least partially) for their operations; how might those services be cut, or the costs passed on to people in different ways? For example, in Arizona, where the state just passed a bill, SB 1197, to eliminate juvenile fines and fees, the budget office estimated the local government revenue would be reduced by $1.5 million a year, with some of that cost covered by charging the youth’s health insurance companies for the treatment mandated by the court. Yet even here, it is unclear how much of that estimated $1.5 million actually would be received, versus just imposed (see Pager, Goldstein, Ho and Western 2022). The overall point remains that states need to fund their agencies at sufficient levels to do their work, without passing on the costs to their citizens in non-transparent ways. In addition, while youths and families’ financial burden will be greatly reduced with the elimination of fines and fees, restitution remains in effect which can still be debilitating for many youths and families to the point where many still would not be able to pay back the victims in a timely or comprehensive manner. Finally, focusing reform efforts on eliminating monetary sanctions does not go far enough to address the increased surveillance of youths and deleterious effect of the early and frequent contact between the police and youth, particularly youths of color who are poor, that led to those monetary sanctions in the first place. We need to rethink how often and to what extent police have contact with youths (in schools and in communities) and the downstream consequences of those initial points of contact – for the youths, their families, and our communities.

6. Conclusion

This paper has explored how juvenile monetary sanctions affect peoples’ lives long after their involvement in the juvenile legal system ends. Beyond their significant financial implications, juvenile monetary sanctions help shape how young people learn about the law and their adultification process. That in turn leads youth to develop legal cynicism and a future orientation that only further marginalizes them. That is, much like Pattillo and Kirk (2021) find among adults, young peoples’ contact with the juvenile legal system socializes them to view the law as driven by money, versus justice or fairness, such that freedom can be bought. Moreover, involvement in the juvenile legal system represented a clear life disruption and detour into adultification for many who were forced into dealing with the system by themselves, without family support or the protected status of being minors. These experiences shape the youth’s legal cynicism as they develop a deep mistrust and frustration with the system that sets them up to fail so as to keep them tethered to the system into adulthood. Their future orientation – while still aspirational for some – is then significantly shaped by this early legal contact, along with the monetary sanctions, that hinders their job, educational and family prospects.

One limitation to this paper is that we were unable to disentangle the effects of monetary sanctions separate from early contact with police and the juvenile legal system. However, that very limitation also highlights a key contribution of our paper. That is, this retrospective analysis shows the cumulative impact of involvement in the juvenile and criminal legal systems, in that people are experiencing the two systems – through the constant of monetary sanctions – as one punitive and financially-motivated system.

The findings for this paper revealed three issues that, while outside the scope of this paper, deserve further exploration in future research. The first pertains to the administrative aspects of monetary sanctions. While this issue has been addressed elsewhere related to administrative hurdles in either the juvenile legal system (Paik and Packard 2023) or criminal legal system (Cadigan and Kirk 2020; Link et al. 2021; Spencer-Suarez and Martin 2021), the fact that the people in our study had both juvenile and criminal legal system involvement only adds to the empirical imperative and complexity in parsing out how much people owe and the consequences of monetary sanction nonpayment. Moreover, it is not just multi-institutional within one setting – it is multi-jurisdictional and multi-state as people often move over their life course.

The second area entails a more comprehensive understanding about the extent and implications of family members paying for a person’s monetary sanctions, building on the research of Boches et al. (2022) and Paik and Packard (2019). As mentioned earlier, parents are legally required to pay for some aspects of juvenile monetary sanctions, leading to possible liens placed on their homes and further limitations to the entire household. In addition to the financial implications of these issues, more research is needed into how this affects the relationships between the youth and parents, siblings, and extended family.

The third area needing further research is the examination of any potential racial differences in the sentencing of monetary sanctions and their consequences. Given that youth of color experience increased and often more punitive contact with the juvenile legal system compared to their white counterparts, future research is needed to examine the ways that monetary sanctions might differentially impact youth of color; their ability to pay the financial penalties and resulting consequences. This additional research is needed to bring to light the insidious ways that systems of social control operate across institutions and over the life course to exacerbate racial and economic inequalities.

Highlights.

Youth’s juvenile justice involvement can lead to financial debt into adulthood.

Juvenile monetary sanctions propel youth into early adulthood, with negative effects.

Juvenile monetary sanctions hinder individuals’ educational and work aspirations.

Juvenile monetary sanctions increase individuals’ distrust of the legal system.