Pay-to-stay (imprisonment) - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org

Very weird that I am so old and have literally never heard this mentioned in a TV show or book or movie or anything.

In four out of five states, if you go to prison, you are literally paying for the time you spend there.

As you can guess, this results in crippling debt as soon as you’re released.

The county gets back a fraction of what they hold over your head the rest of your life until you commit suicide(or die naturally and peacefully with the sword of damocles hanging over your head).

$20-$80 a day according to Rutgers.

Counties apparently sue people and employ wage garnishment to get back the money that majority of people obviously cannot pay back.

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incarcerated-people-pay-stay-fees

  • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Trying to offset the cost of a societal need by charging fees to prisons (sic) doesn’t even make any sense.

    Sure it does. It costs $$$ to build jails and prisons and more $$$ to run them. Why should I, the victim, have to pay twice? (once for my car, which the thief stole, and again in my taxes to fund the legal system once the thief is caught)

    I can very much entertain an argument like that (counter-argument, pay prisoners minimum wage for whatever work they do and charge the $20/day from that).

    But that’s not what’s going on here.

    This is about a collection agency figuring out how to profit from a captive audience. It deserves the same regard from us as prison phone operators do.

    It’s really just another form of predatory bullshit.

    The prisons themselves say they aren’t a significant revenue stream

    This is crucial here, IMO. We could put whatever we want on the bills – hell, we could charge a million dollar fee for each sentence! That would fix the funding problems – but the simple truth is that most of the prisoners don’t have the money.

    • orrk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      the overwhelming majority of inmates are non-violent offenders, often times in prison for the heinous crime of: smoking weed, or some other petty crime

      • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        Okay? I don’t understand what point you might be trying to make with this statement, even if it were true.

        But the actual figure is 45% for drug offenses. That is the single biggest category, but I find it disingenuous to characterize “less than half” as “overwhelming majority”.

        • orrk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          6 months ago

          so, here is the fun bit about statistics, when you have more than say, 3-4 different options the thing with almost half generally is an overwhelming majority

          • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
            12·
            6 months ago

            No, it’s incredibly misleading. When you said that, I expected to find something like 80% of prisoners are there because of drugs. Instead, I find that it’s less than half.

            • orrk@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              6 months ago

              it’s not misleading at all? half is a REALLY large amount. like i get that this is an issue of humans not having math brains, but imagine if you will:

              a bag with 20 marbles, 10 blue, 3yellow, 2red, 2pink, 1green, 1black, and 1 clear.

    • Bjornir@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      If the issue was cost, you would build schools. A better educated population get less sick, earns more and thus pays more taxes, commit way less crimes, get less social welfare, in short it is a net gain in tax dollars.

      Plus, someone who gets out of jail with a big debt will very likely cost way more to society than what could ever be recovered from them.