“When I was inside, my family sent money orders, and a significant chunk, 55%, was taken away for fees. Every time my people would send me money orders, they would take out 55% of whatever I was sent in; if my cousins sent me $100, they would give me $45 cash to eat in the canteen and keep $55.”
“While I was locked up, I was charged $100 for medical check-ups, whether it was an annual physical or something minor like a cold. They charged me for over-the-counter medication that I could have just bought myself.”
“They hit you with fees for everything, from housing to medical services. And those debts? Even if the person goes home tomorrow and comes back in three years, that same bill will be waiting for them.”
Those are stories from three anonymous interview participants featured in a report by Campaign Zero titled, “Paying for One’s Own Incarceration: National Landscape of ‘Pay-to-Stay’ Fees.”
The report took an in-depth look at pay-to-stay fees, which it described as “the harmful practice of charging adults and youths held in jails, prisons, and youth residential facilities for the costs of their incarceration, including medical fees and expenses for room & board.”
The report, released in June, examined incarceration on the state level and broke the fees up into four categories: adult room and board fees, adult medical fees, youth room and board fees and youth medical fees.
It found that between June 2022 and December 2023, 48 states imposed at least one category of pay-to-stay fees, and 26 states imposed all four categories. California and Illinois were the only two states that repealed fees for all categories in state correctional facilities.
Pay-to-stay fees are also imposed on the city and county levels.
“When we started this, we were surprised that this was as widespread as it is,” DeRay Mckesson, executive director of Campaign Zero, said to The Final Call.
He and the organization discovered the issue of pay-to-stay fees after connecting with Dr. Brittany Friedman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who has done extensive research on the subject. In a 2020 article on pay-to-stay fees, Ms. Friedman included programming fees, email and telephone calls and commissary items.
Medical fees
One of the types of fees examined in the Campaign Zero report is medical fees and co-pays.
Mr. Mckesson explained how medical co-pays, which are fees incarcerated people pay to access health care, prevent people from getting the care they need.
“Because if you don’t make money while you’re incarcerated, then you have to pay to go see the doctor, that means that you’re actually just not going to go see the doctor. So, your health is getting worse while you’re incarcerated and potentially the health of people around you,”
He said. “Say, for example, you have the flu and you can’t afford to see the doctor inside. You’re actually endangering all the people around you as well. That’s bad for everybody.”
Individuals locked behind prison bars in Texas paid $13.55 per medical visit, even though Texas does not pay incarcerated workers anything, according to an analysis first published by the American Bar Association’s magazine, Human Rights.
And later published by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2023. Dallas County, Texas, “charges incarcerated people a $10 medical care fee for each medical request they submit,” according to the analysis.
Room and board fees
Room and board fees include the costs of housing and meals. The Brennan Center found 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.”
In Michigan, counties can seek reimbursement for expenses that jailed persons incur. Wisconsin counties charged an average of $13 a day, which is about $390 a month, according to the report published by the Brennan Center.
“You already got a sentence. You’re already incarcerated. The state shouldn’t be able to add on to that sentence. They’re essentially adding another penalty on by charging you room and board. It’s not a hotel. You are being punished there. This is a consequence. Why do you have to pay for that?” Mr. Mckesson questioned.
Communication fees
Ernest Johnson, director of Ubuntu Village NOLA, spoke to The Final Call about the harmful effects of telephone fees. He assisted efforts in an earlier report on the cost of incarceration published in 2015 by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, Research Action Design and 20 other organizations.
“The phone system and it being some private companies and not your traditional telephone service company, it’s making a whole lot of money off of people to stay connected to their loved ones,” he said, adding that communication fees are one way that families are burdened by incarceration.
The Brennan Center’s published analysis found that one Kentucky jail charged $0.40 a minute for a video call and $0.50 a minute for long-distance telephone calls. This translates to $8 for a 20-minute video call and $10 for a 20-minute long-distance phone call. If an individual does not have money in their account for a call, their families are charged with additional fees for collect calls.
“Kentucky currently charges the highest rate in the country for a 15-minute phone call, costing incarcerated people between $5.70 and $9.99,” the analysis said.
Meanwhile, individuals using email paid $0.47 per email in the Texas prison system and $0.50 per email in a Wyoming jail.
Commissary fees
The Brennan Center’s published analysis found that in Florida prisons, people paid $1.70 for a packet of four extra-strength Tylenol and $4.02 for four tampons, and in Kentucky, due to inflation, incarcerated people paid $3.77 for a 4.6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste and $4.84 for a three-ounce Speed Stick deodorant.
“When you talk about commissary, when you talk about debt in the same way of when you pay for commissary, the funds have to come from your particular families, and in a lot of cases and facilities nowadays, there’s a third-party fee that taxes you, taking a percentage of money based on how much you give to an individual in the prison system,”
Mr. Johnson said. “We actually know legally that taxpayers are paying for people to be incarcerated, and then it’s like a double jeopardy. You tax the families, so it’s another burden on the families.”
The disproportionate impact
The Campaign Zero report listed some of the lasting harm pay-to-stay fees can cause, including imposing excessive financial burdens on incarcerated individuals and their families, preventing incarcerated individuals from being able to access basic goods and services.
Including medical care, and hindering a person’s reentry into society after they have served their sentence. They also fail to generate meaningful revenue, and they disproportionately impact low-income Black and other non-White communities.
“It’s another way to trap people in the cycle of incarceration, but they’re built as accountability. So what happens when you get out of prison and you’re immediately in debt?
You start off trapped all over again, and there’s no state that we found that actually makes money from it,” Mr. Mckesson said. “No matter how much you collect, the states aren’t actually making a profit. This is just to penalize people.”
Some pay-to-stay fees are automatically deducted from an individual’s wages or prison account and built into debt over time, while other fees are collected by the state post-release, the report says.
Mr. Johnson considered pay-to-stay fees as “just another layer of keeping people who are already struggling to make ends meet fall even more in debt or deeper into being depressed about their loved ones and family members.”
“It’s just another layer of subtle oppression that keeps, in particular, Black and minority people in this container where it’s difficult for them to elevate when you talk about it from an economic standpoint,” he said.
According to the Brennan Center’s published analysis, pay-to-stay fees can reach up to $20 to $80 per day for the entire period of incarceration, but “those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities”
Only earn between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour, on average. Those working for the state’s correctional industries make slightly more, an average of $0.33 to $1.41 an hour.
“Because many low-income people can’t pay their debt, billions of dollars in fines and fees go unpaid every year,” the report said.
Mr. Mckesson and his team found that when they talked to legislators, legislators said they didn’t know the fees existed. “These are relatively old laws, so very few of the people elected today were even elected when these got put into place. And because the incarcerated people are sort of a forgotten group of people unless there’s a big issue, no one’s paying attention,” Mr. Mckesson said.
But, he said, “the good news is that states can get rid of them immediately. Legislatures can ban the practice, and they can do it quickly.”
Campaign Zero urges policymakers to repeal and strike through all applicable language pertaining to youth and adult costs of incarceration, including room and board fees and medical co-pay, to explicitly ban pay-to-stay fees and to include retroactive language and void fees that have already been imposed.
The Nation of Islam has had a history of transforming the lives of incarcerated individuals. On page 114 of his 1993 book, “A Torchlight for America,” in a chapter titled “Developing America’s Moral Backbone,” the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan writes,
“The rate of recidivism, or tendency to return to criminal habits, indicates that there is no real reform. In fact, the inmate’s propensity toward criminal behavior only worsens after going to prison.
And $18,000 of the taxpayer’s money is spent per year per inmate to keep them in prison. In effect, billions are spent each year to create and maintain hardened criminals that remain the outcasts of the society.
“When you look at what the Muslims are doing with our prison program, in the midst of you, here again you see a torchlight. Muslims are relatively crime free, and our rate of recidivism is lower than in the main.
We respect law and order. Since so many of the inmates are our people, why not let us reform them and help to save some of the taxpayer’s money,” he continued on the next page.
“Why not let us handle the inmates and lessen the taxpayer’s burden. We can handle the inmates for less than what America is paying now. And better, we can reform our people and make them productive members of society.”