Pay now, pay later: states impose prison peonage - Life In Prison - includes related article on prison factories - Cover Story

Progressive, The, July, 1996 by Christian Parenti

Kenneth Stewart ST. is distressed. His son, Kenny, is on Virginia's death row and owes the state $57,756.20 for the cost of his jury trial--not his defense, but his whole trial. In Virginia, a jury trial is still a right, but one that losing defendants must literally pay for.

"Last week I sent $50 up to Kenny's account and there wasn't but six cents left in it after the authorities took their share," Stewart says.

Complicating matters are Kenny Stewart's abscessing teeth. "They charge fifty bucks to pull teeth, and Kenny needs most of his taken out," says the senior Stewart, who receives $850 a month in social security and wages as a part-time security guard. Every month he sends $200 to his son Kenny's prison account in the hopes that Kenny's teeth will be worked on.

On top of the $50 "co-payments" for medieval-style dental extractions, Kenny--like prisoners throughout the nation--must buy his own toiletries, underwear, socks, cigarettes, and stationery. Due to the notoriously bad prison food, most prisoners are forced to supplement the official diet with the occasional can of tuna fish or soup mix from the commissary. But with a $57,000 debt around his neck, and a mouth full of dental bills, Kenny Stewart goes without the basics as he awaits execution.

Kenny Stewart's predicament is emblematic of a trend in American prisons to shift the costs of incarceration onto prisoners. Throughout the country, state corrections departments are squeezing whatever funds possible from the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans. Prisons extract money from their inmates by charging for court costs, imposing medical co-payments, seizing prisoners' assets, garnishing prisoners' wages, and pursuing former prisoners for the cost of their incarceration.

In Virginia, the accounting of justice is a picayune affair. Stewart and the 1,684 other Virginia, prisoners who are paying the costs of their trials are, upon their defeat in court, slapped with an itemized bill that includes these standard charges: $100 forensics fee, $200 sentencing fee, $2 courthouse-maintenance fee, $65 court-reporter's fee, $12 sheriff's fee, $32.50 clerk's fee, $265 felony fee. And the most bizarre charge of all, as Stewart's lawyer David Baugh points out, is the "jury lunch fec." "If they get beanie weenies, you get a break. If they get shrimp, you're screwed," says Baugh.

The minimum cost to a losing defendant is $720 for the first day of trial. After that the cost drops to $360 per day, or $30 per juror. Last year, Virginia collected $36 million in court fees--and that was for trial costs, not fines.

This arcane Virginia law, recently resurrected by get-tough legislators, is coming under-increasing legal pressure. Baugh and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are planning to sue, arguing that charging for a jury trial violates the, Constitution's Sixth Amendment (the right to a jury trial) and Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection under the law). No other state charges for criminal jury trials, though the National Center for State Courts,reports that twenty-six states charge court fees in civil cases. Nonetheless, the Virginia attorney general's office defends its position. "Just because we're the only one that does it doesn't mean it's wrong," said spokesperson Mark Miner in a recent news report.

To help recoup a small portion of booming prison-construction costs, and to throw a bone to a vengeful public, many states enforce a pay-to-stay policy for inmates.

From small county jails to maximum-security state penitentiaries, inmates are being forced to pay room and board while they're locked away. According to an ACLU National Prison Project survey, twenty-one of the nation's state prison systems require at least some inmates to make payments toward room and board. Often the rule applies only to inmates employed in prison industries or by private firms that use prison labor. Such jobs pay between fifty cents and $4.25 an hour, with between 25 and 50 percent of the inmate's wages going toward room and board. However, many states and counties are beginning to charge regardless of a prisoner's ability to pay.

Michigan has one of the more established pay-to-stay programs. Relying on a previously dormant, sixty-year-old law known as the Prisoners Reimbursement Act, the Michigan attorney general's office has launched an aggressive campaign of lawsuits against inmates it deems able to pay the $40-a-day cost of their incarceration.

In 1994 the state collected $400,000 from prison inmates' bank accounts and pensions. And every year the Department of Corrections collects up to $1 million in rent from prisoners in halfway houses and prison work camps. "Taxpayers like the idea that we don't allow prisoners to profit from their crimes," says Attorney General Frank Kelley.

But not everyone agrees. Louise Grable contended that the state was unfair when it took 90 percent of her sixty-three-year-old, incarcerated husband's $398 monthly General Motors pension. He's currently serving three to sixteen years for sexually molesting a young girl, and he left his wife with no income other than the pension.