This report was co-released by the WVCBP and the Midian Leadership Project.
In the spring of 2023, we at the Midian Leadership Project teamed up with the American Friends Service Committee to host listening sessions with young adults who had spent part of their childhood in the criminal legal system.
Read the full report.
We wanted to understand how criminal system fines and fees affected them. We heard how legal debts strained family finances and led to suspended driver’s licenses. But they also spoke of other impacts: stress, depression, unnecessary family separations, and a shrinking sense of possibility.
Then, within months of those listening sessions, we began to hear a familiar drumbeat. School administrators, politicians, and commentators called for action to address what they characterized as a “chronic problem” of children missing school and behaving poorly.
These state leaders wanted to expand a 2023 law that allowed teachers to remove middle and high school students deemed “disorderly.”2 That law, they argued, should be expanded to include elementary school children.3 Others called for more enforcement of truancy laws.
We wondered if these lawmakers would be so keen to increase punitive measures against children if they had heard what we had in those listening sessions. We partnered with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy (WVCBP) to ask: What does it cost a child to be exposed to this system?
Our research began with a look at the costs imposed by courts: fines, fees, and restitution. But as we reviewed the data and spoke with those personally impacted by the criminal legal system, we learned that the most serious costs are those that go uncounted.
This report is our attempt to combine the stories we heard at our listening sessions, research on fees and fines in the judicial system, and data about the criminal legal system in West Virginia to provide a fuller accounting of harms done by the criminal legal system and what it might require to truly interrupt these harms.
Read the full report.
