For example, Judge Scott Davis, of Travis County, said that eight years ago, the justice court's juvenile docket usually consisted of about five traffic offenses a day. This represents a state-wide shift in school policy from handling such cases within the schools' disciplinary systems to a systematic referral to the local court. Municipal and justice courts have several options available to dispose of juvenile cases. Incarceration is not among them because by definition, these courts do not have jurisdiction over juvenile cases for which confinement is authorized. Most municipal and justice courts rely heavily on fines as their major dispositional tool against adults.
Fines tend to be less effective against juveniles because of their limited economic resources.
However, in some cases, especially traffic violations, a fine is appropriate because the juvenile may have the ability to pay. Municipal courts tend to rely on fines for juveniles more often than justice courts, probably because they tend to have more traffic-related cases. However, jail confinement for failure to pay a fine is prohibited for juveniles. Initially, it might appear that this raises a serious problem for municipal and justice court judges. In Dallas, for example, one juvenile has racked up forty outstanding warrants.10 Undoubtedly, the children know that they can not go to jail for failure to pay.