Daily Rate of $6.43 Set for Stay in Juvenile Hall

At $6.43 per day for room and board, the housing may be the best bargain in Orange County. There’s no waiting list. Children are welcome. But few want to get in.

The low-priced food and shelter are available to Juvenile Hall inmates, whose parents will be billed for their children’s incarceration, under new rules approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

The setting of the room-and-board rate began a renewed effort to recover the county’s costs in detaining juveniles. A similar fee program, in place since 1958, was halted in 1982, when the California Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state law on which it was based. That law required the counties to bill juvenile detainees’ parents for the costs of custody.

The Legislature last year rewrote the law, and a new version was effective Jan. 1. The billing of parents under the new law is to begin March 18.

In rewriting the statute, legislators sought to eliminate the Supreme Court’s objection that it violated the equal-protection guarantee by singling out the parents to bear the cost of that protection. The revised law limits the charges to basic items, such as food, clothing and toiletries, and certain extraordinary expenses, such as medical costs.

Orange County’s chief probation officer, Michael Schumacher, said the new fees will generate $425,000 a year in revenue, with administrative costs to the county of about $110,000.

Schumacher told the supervisors, in a staff report, that the cost of custody for each juvenile is much higher than $6.43 daily, but the new legislation prohibits fees for administrative expenses, security, staff salaries or building-maintenance costs.

Parents were billed up to $53 a day before the 1982 court decision interrupted the fee program.

County officials said Tuesday the new law also allows them to bill parents for extraordinary medical care and transportation costs, and that fee schedules for recovering those extra expenses will be proposed later this year.

Parents will be required to make financial statements, officials said, and collections will be limited to what parents are able to pay.