Making the Poor Pay for Their Incarceration

 Reading America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars and my first thought is that America's prison system keeps the poor impoverished.

As the number of people sentenced to jails and prisons has skyrocketed, government agencies have found themselves unable to pay for the associated costs. While the nation’s incarcerated population peaked in 2009, decades of deepening mass incarceration’s hold on the nation resulted in runaway costs. In fact, the Urban Institute estimates that states and local governments spent $82 billion on corrections in 2019. To offset these costs, policymakers have justified legislation authorizing an ever-growing body of fees to be charged to the people (and, as a result, often their families) in prison and jail by claiming some fees, such as medical fees, will deter unnecessary visits that overtax correctional medical systems. These policymakers and government officials also know that this captive population has no choice but to foot the bill for the government’s own increasing costs of jail and prison administration and that if they can’t be made to pay, their families can. In fact, a 2015 report led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design found that in 63 percent of cases, family members on the outside were primarily responsible for court-related costs associated with conviction; when broken down further into which family members were primarily responsible for the costs, 83 percent were women.

Rutgers sociology professor Brittany Friedman has written extensively on what is called “pay-to-stay” fees in American correctional institutions. In her 2020 article titled, “Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration,” Friedman divides these fees into two categories: (1) room and board and (2) service-specific costs. Fees for room and board—yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food—are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. The second category, what Friedman refers to as “service-specific costs,” includes fees for basic charges such as copays or other costs for seeing a doctor or nurse, programming fees, email and telephone calls, and commissary items.

In 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that at least 43 states authorize charging incarcerated people for the cost of their own imprisonment, and at least 35 states authorize charging them for some medical expenses. More recent research from the Prison Policy Institute found that 40 states and the federal prison system charge incarcerated people medical copays.

The federal system charges a fee for convicting you. I recall $200.00. That my father wound up paying.

And this induces more incarceration:

Correctional agencies make money from contracts with companies such as JPay. For example, if someone sends an incarcerated person in Florida $20 online, they will end up paying $24.95. The $4.95 fee goes to JPay, and JPay sends a portion of the profit to the Florida Department of Corrections at a rate of $2.75 per money transfer. In Maine’s Hancock County Jail, JPay charges $12.95 if you put $200.01–$300.00 on an incarcerated person’s account. In Florida’s Avon Park Correctional Institution, the same transaction costs $13.95.

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In Gaston County, North Carolina, incarcerated individuals who participate in state work release may make more than the state’s $0.38 an hour maximum pay, but they pay the jail a daily rate based on their yearly income of at least $18 per day and up to $36 per day. In fact, Brennan Center research indicates that almost every state takes a portion of the salary that incarcerated workers earn to compensate the corrections agency for the cost of feeding, housing, and supervising them.

These room and board fees are found throughout the nation’s jails and prisons. Michigan laws allow any county to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in relation to a charge for which a person was sentenced to county jail time—up to $60 a day. Winnebago County, Wisconsin, charges $26 a day to those staying in its county jail. On average, Wisconsin counties charge a pay-to-stay fee of $13 a day (about $390 a month).

So, when people return home they are already in debt, how does this keep them from thinking of crime to pay for their debts?

Deterrence does not work when it consists only of imprisonment. Add to this imprisonment piling debt onto the incarcerated poor, where is the deterrence?

Where imprisonment is about making money for the government, where is the inducement for any reformation of the incarcerated?

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