The Hidden Cost of Going to Court: Introducing the Clutch Justice Court Harm Index

Michigan’s courts record every filing, charge, and sentence. Nobody records the drive, the wait, the lost shift, or the missed bedtime. Clutch Justice is going to start counting.

The Cost Nobody Is Counting

I want to start with a morning that will sound familiar to a lot of people.

Take a hypothetical. A woman in rural Michigan has a 9:00 a.m. hearing at a courthouse 90 minutes from home. She leaves at 7:00 to allow for weather and parking. She pays a neighbor to get her kids on the bus. She loses a full shift at a job with no paid leave, after her supervisor has already warned her about absences. The courthouse lot is full, so she pays for a garage two blocks away. Her case is called at 11:40. The hearing lasts nine minutes. The matter is adjourned and a new date is set three weeks out.

Then she drives home and starts arranging the next one.

Nothing unlawful happened that morning. Nobody broke a rule. The register of actions will show an adjournment and a new date. It will not show the drive. Or the parking receipt. Or the lost shift. Or the neighbor who has to be paid again in three weeks.

Courts are very good at counting what happens to cases. Filings, charges, continuances, dispositions, fines, sentences: all of it is entered, reported, and aggregated. What the people inside those cases spend to keep showing up is entered nowhere. Because each person absorbs it alone, the cumulative picture stays invisible.

Researchers have been naming this problem for decades. Malcolm Feeley’s 1979 study of a lower criminal court, The Process Is the Punishment, found that the costs of moving through the pretrial process often outweighed the sentence a defendant eventually received. Issa Kohler-Hausmann’s 2018 study of New York City’s misdemeanor courts, Misdemeanorland, documented how repeated appearances and procedural hassle function as a form of control in their own right, regardless of how a case ends.

Michigan has seen what happens when someone finally counts. The Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration reported in January 2020 that nearly 358,000 driver’s licenses were suspended in 2018 for failing to appear in court and failing to pay fines and fees, and that driving without a valid license was the third most common reason for jail admission in the state. The Legislature acted on those findings, and since 2021 Michigan no longer suspends licenses for many missed court dates and unpaid fees. That reform started with data that showed the scale of a burden people had been carrying one at a time.

Why I Built This

Here is the honest version. There are only so many articles I can write about the same things Judge Michael Schipper does in his courtroom. There are only so many ways I can say that families have been shortchanged by Judge Margaret Bakker.

I have written those stories, and I will keep writing them. But told one at a time, every one of them can be waved off. One family. One bad day. One unhappy litigant. A pattern is much harder to wave off once it has been counted.

Without the big picture, things will never change. So we need data to prove the harm is real.

Introducing the Clutch Justice Court Harm Index

The Court Harm Index is a community-powered research initiative built to document and measure the human cost of court involvement in Michigan. It was developed independently by Clutch Justice. It is not affiliated with any court, agency, bar association, or advocacy organization, and nobody outside Clutch Justice directs what it measures or how results are reported.

The Index is new, and it should be described accurately: it is a proposed measurement framework, not an already validated scientific instrument. Its job is to collect consistent, comparable accounts of individual court visits so that patterns can be identified across court types, counties, and case categories.

That data has several uses. It can give the public a clearer picture of what court involvement actually demands of people. It can point Clutch Justice reporting toward courts or practices that warrant a closer look. It can give researchers a starting dataset on burdens that rarely appear in official statistics. And where the evidence is consistent, it can inform conversations with legislators and court administrators about where the system asks too much of the people who move through it.

What the Index Measures

The survey is organized around the categories of cost people describe most often after a court visit, along with one category that comes straight from the court record. Use the explorer below to see what each one covers.

From those responses, the Index is built to calculate average travel and waiting time, typical financial burdens per visit, how often specific impacts are reported, and recurring patterns across criminal, family and custody, civil, juvenile, and traffic matters, and across counties.

One Court Visit, One Submission

This is the methodological choice the rest of the project depends on. Each survey response documents one specific court visit. Someone who has attended court five times can complete five surveys, one for each distinct visit. Nobody should submit more than one response describing the same appearance. If you need to fix something you already submitted, the survey lets you mark a new response as a correction.

Visit-level data is what makes the responses comparable. A survey that asked people to summarize years of court involvement in one answer would produce numbers that can’t be lined up against each other. A survey that asks what happened on one specific day, at one specific courthouse, produces records that can be averaged, sorted, and compared.

It also makes cumulative harm measurable. When one person documents several visits in the same matter, those visits can be analyzed together to show how costs stack up over the life of a case.

Repeat participants can use an optional repeat-respondent code of their own choosing, and repeat participation will be accounted for statistically. Someone with twenty appearances should not single-handedly drive conclusions about what court involvement costs a typical person. The analysis is designed to answer two separate questions: what a single visit typically costs, and what repeated court involvement costs a person over time.

Two Short Answers, Not a Case History

Alongside the structured questions, respondents are asked for two short written descriptions. The first asks what happened during this court visit. The second asks what this visit cost you or your family. Each answer is limited to 400 characters.

The limit is deliberate. The goal is consistent, usable data, not litigation histories, accusations, or requests for help with a case. The most useful answers stick to dates, observable events, time, expenses, and concrete consequences. “Waited three hours, hearing lasted eight minutes, adjourned to next month” tells the Index something it can count. So does “lost a day’s pay and paid $60 for childcare.”

How Submissions Will Be Evaluated

Self-reported experience is legitimate research data, and it will be treated that way. People are the best source on how long they waited, what they paid, and what they missed. Some claims will need corroboration before Clutch Justice describes them as verified findings, and the Index keeps three categories separate.

Not every response will be independently verified, and the dataset will not represent every person involved in Michigan’s courts. Respondents choose to participate, so results describe the people who took part, not the state as a whole.

Privacy is a design principle for the Index: collect what the research questions require, report findings in aggregate, and keep individual responses out of public view. The survey does not ask for your name. The judge’s name and case number are optional. Responses are treated as confidential, but they are not guaranteed to be anonymous, because details like a repeat-respondent code or a submission date can link responses together. Do not include children’s names, addresses, medical details, or sealed or privileged information. Read the survey’s own notice before submitting.

What This Research Could Answer

Michigan’s 303 trial courts cost roughly $1.2 billion a year to run, according to a 2026 Pew Charitable Trusts analysis of the state’s court funding structure. That spending is tracked down to the funding source. The Index is built to put comparable numbers on the other side of the ledger.

The research questions are concrete. How much work time do respondents report losing to court attendance? How long do they spend traveling and waiting, and how does that compare to the length of the proceeding? How often do respondents report being unable to afford fines and fees imposed at a visit? Among verified criminal sentences, how often does the imposed minimum exceed the applicable guideline range, and by how much? How many respondents report family separation, housing instability, or job disruption connected to court involvement?

Consistent answers can identify questions for deeper investigation, sharpen public discussion of how courts schedule and operate, and support consideration of policy changes where the evidence warrants it. The survey alone will not establish statewide prevalence, and it does not guarantee any legislative outcome. It gives people who make decisions about courts something they currently lack: a structured record of what those decisions cost the public.

Why This Matters

I have spent years reading registers of actions, and here is what I notice every time. The record tells you a hearing was adjourned. It doesn’t tell you who paid for it.

That gap isn’t an accident of bad recordkeeping. It reflects what the system was built to watch. Courts measure throughput because throughput is what they are funded, audited, and evaluated on. The people moving through them carry the rest, and they carry it individually, which is exactly why it never shows up as a pattern.

If you have been to court in Michigan, your visit is data. Document it.

We track what happens to cases. It’s time we started measuring what happens to people.