Welcome to Prison. Will You Be
Paying Cash or Credit?
Belt-tightening municipalities like
Tennessee's Anderson County are asking prisoners to help pay their own way —
but experts say it probably won't work out for convicts or taxpayers
Southern hospitality is
famous, but the accommodations at Anderson County Jail will no longer be
gratis. Inmates at this correctional institution northwest of Knoxville, Tenn.,
will soon have to pay fed-up taxpayers $9.15 for each pair of pants issued
during their stay, $6.26 for each blanket and $1.15 for each towel. They’ll
even have to shell out 29¢ for toilet paper.
A county of about 75,000
people, Anderson, like many municipalities across the country, has seen the
cost of housing inmates rise in the past few years. And like many states,
cities and counties facing tight budget constraints, Anderson has turned to the
inmates themselves to defray some of those costs.
“Our taxpayers pay $62 a
day to house one inmate,” says Jay Yeager, the Anderson County law director who
proposed the program. “Our inmate care, medical care, housing care, all those
budgetary codes have escalated over the past several years, and it’s an
unreasonable burden on our taxpayers. What we’re trying to do is shift the
burden off the taxpayers’ back, to the inmates.”
Anderson County is only
the latest in a long line of cash-strapped municipalities to levy fees to help
fund their criminal-justice systems. The practice is common in California, Texas, New York and
Illinois. Since 1996, Florida has added 20 fees. And in 2010, the Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University Law School surveyed the 15 states
with the highest prison populations, which accounted for nearly 70% of all
state prisoners in the country, and found myriad fees assessed both during and
after prison stays: administrative fees, supervision and transportation fees,
even a $60 fee in Pennsylvania just to enter the parole program.
Policies charging inmates
are popular with taxpayers, but legal experts are skeptical about whether they
close budget gaps. “It may be more symbolic than anything else,” Dwight Aarons,
a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, says of Anderson
County’s new policy. “I really don’t know how people in jail are supposed to
make enough money to be able pay for those items.”
Yeager said he isn’t sure
how much money the new fees will bring to the county. In May, when county
officials began discussing a budget for the new fiscal year, spending requests
exceeded expected revenue by $4 million. Over three months in the following
quarter, Yeager is requesting that the jail do an analysis of how much money
the county can recoup with the new fees. “We’re hoping to recover some money,
but honestly, the likelihood of getting a high-percentage reimbursement is
small,” he says.
Legal experts point out
that prison fees don’t yield much revenue because the majority of prisoners in
the U.S. are poor. Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows nearly two-thirds of
state-prison inmates don’t have a high school diploma. According to some
studies, nearly a quarter of convicts expect to go to homeless shelters after
prison, and more than half are still unemployed a year after their release.
Prison fees can also
create another obstacle for inmates after they’re released: intractable debt.
In Florida, the state relied on private collection agencies that added
surcharges as high as 40%; in California, failure to pay a fee resulted in an
extra $300 charge. And in some cases these fees can land convicts back in
prison, costing taxpayers even more.
Judges in several states
have sent former inmates back to prison for failure to appear at court hearings
related to their debt, a practice critics say is akin to modern-day debtor’s
prison. A 2012 report by the Brennan Center found that in 2009, Mecklenburg
County, N.C., sent 246 people back to prison because they fell behind on their
debts. The county was able to collect $33,476, but the incarcerations cost
nearly $40,000, leaving taxpayers in the red. Missouri allows people to
voluntarily go back behind bars to “pay off” debts. Circuit judges have the
power, at the defendant’s request, to commute fines and fees in return for more
jail time, where the inmate is credited $10 per day.
“This is an unfair burden
on the poor, and what happens in these situations oftentimes is that the
relatives of the inmates end up shouldering the financial burden,” says
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a lawyer at the Brennan Center.
According to Yeager, that
won’t happen in Anderson County. “It’s not a situation where their parole or
probation can be revoked. Only the people that are able to pay or are gainfully
employed will be able to pay these fees,” he says. “We don’t want to run our
operation like a pauper’s prison and keep them in jail simply on court costs.
That doesn’t work.”
States and municipalities
across the country are finding out a lot about what doesn’t work in the prison
system. America’s prison population — the U.S. has about 2.2 million prisoners,
more than any other country in the world — has re-entered the national
conversation on both sides of the political spectrum. Last week, Attorney
General Eric Holder ordered the Justice Department to take steps aimed at
reducing the prison population by no longer charging nonviolent offenders with
serious crimes leading to long prison sentences.
A few days later,
Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken
Cuccinelli told the Washington Post,
“There is an expectation that the generic Republican position is tough on
crime. But even that has budget limits, particularly on the prison side.”
Data on debt-related
sentences are scarce, but experts point out that debt hearings clog up an
already stretched legal system. In one survey of a New Orleans court, more than
6% of cases involved debt-collection issues; of those, nearly a quarter had an
arrest warrant issued because of a failure to appear.
“There’s been a
left-right consensus that nonviolent offenders don’t really need to be in
prison; we can find less costly ways of dealing with that,” says Rebekah
Diller, a professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, who
co-authored the Brennan Center study. “This should be part of that discussion
if we have people filling jail beds because they couldn’t pay some sort of
fee.”
As Anderson County
studies the impact of jail fees on the county’s finances, Yeager is planning to
propose a way to reduce recidivism. Next month, the county commission will vote
on a plan to convert part of the jail into a workhouse. Inmates serving time
for misdemeanors who have jobs will be able to leave to work their shifts, then
return to the prison each day.
“One of
the major contributors to a high recidivism rate is loss of a job, so if an
inmate is serving time on a misdemeanor sentence and they have a job, we want
them to keep their job,” Yeager says. But nothing comes free for the
prisoners of Anderson County. If the proposal passes, they’ll be charged the
daily fee, plus extra for being escorted to and from their jobs.
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