County Spent Over $13,000 on Outside Counsel to Collect on $1,004 Detention Debt Owed by Grandmother.
California state law apparently allows a parent or guardian of minors to be charged for their criminal detention through county probation departments, although state law also prohibits billing the indigent. These laws have created quite an uproar when applied to one retired grandmother with a very limited income.
Sally Stokes, a 56-year-old retired aerospace worker living in Compton, took on four of her grandchildren 14 years ago after they were abused by her daughter’s boyfriend. One of the teenage granddaughters was charged with vandalism and criminal threats, but later released. However, a $1,004 detention debt had been racked up. Los Angeles County attempted to collect it from Sally at a rate of $25 per month, even though she only collected $1,630 in monthly Social Security payments. Sally claimed that she could not afford the payment, with the probation department apparently improperly counting the state payments she received for other grandchildren toward her income. The main problem is that the County had a general moratorium against collecting these types of overdue payments. Somehow, Sally slipped between the cracks.
County hired outside counsel (Lawrence, Beach, Allen & Choi) to pursue collection of the debt. Outside counsel has spent over $13,000 so far on the process, although Sally’s attorney initially challenged the constitutionality of the probation billing process.
County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky recently grilled County Counsel Raymond Fortner about this case and the overall cost effectiveness of probation billing delinquency collection efforts. In 2008, the County spent nearly $900,000, excluding legal fees, to collect only $2.6 million out of $23.6 million owed for these delinquencies.
We thank Molly Hennessy-Fiske for reporting on this particular case. If you want to see more, refer to her March 4, 2009 article, “L.A. County spends nearly $13,000 to chase $1,004,” which can be found on The Los Angeles Times’ website.