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Philadelphia Will Stop Billing Parents When Their Children Are Incarcerated
The city of Philadelphia announced Friday that it will stop billing parents for the cost of their children’s incarceration, just hours after a front-page Marshall Project story in The Washington Post highlighted the practice in the city and across the nation.
Heather Keafer, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, said the decision to stop charging parents will go into effect immediately. The agency already said late Thursday it plans to end its contract with Steve Kaplan, a private attorney who since 1998 has been collecting from parents on behalf of Philadelphia — earning up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee. His contract will end March 31.
...
Nineteen states and county-level juvenile justice systems in 28 other states now charge parents for jailing juveniles, often using a child-support model to determine the cost and collect debt, the story found. But there are some signs of change: A county-by-county effort to end the collections is also underway in California, where a bill to abolish the practice outright has been introduced in the state legislature.
Until the shift in Philadelphia, parents of roughly 730 detained children there were being billed up to $1,000 a month to pay for their children’s stints in juvenile detention, even though many are so poor they could afford monthly installments of only $5. The city’s efforts netted just $551,261 in fiscal 2016, far short of the more than $80 million it spent on all delinquent placements.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/03/03/philadelphia-will-stop-billing-parents-when-their-children-are-incarcerated#.UfzkrSQVU
Heather Keafer, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, said the decision to stop charging parents will go into effect immediately. The agency already said late Thursday it plans to end its contract with Steve Kaplan, a private attorney who since 1998 has been collecting from parents on behalf of Philadelphia — earning up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee. His contract will end March 31.
...
Nineteen states and county-level juvenile justice systems in 28 other states now charge parents for jailing juveniles, often using a child-support model to determine the cost and collect debt, the story found. But there are some signs of change: A county-by-county effort to end the collections is also underway in California, where a bill to abolish the practice outright has been introduced in the state legislature.
Until the shift in Philadelphia, parents of roughly 730 detained children there were being billed up to $1,000 a month to pay for their children’s stints in juvenile detention, even though many are so poor they could afford monthly installments of only $5. The city’s efforts netted just $551,261 in fiscal 2016, far short of the more than $80 million it spent on all delinquent placements.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/03/03/philadelphia-will-stop-billing-parents-when-their-children-are-incarcerated#.UfzkrSQVU