Three items that I saw this week underscore the connections between money and prisons. I wanted to take a moment to highlight them here.

[A] Fox 5 News investigation found the biggest cost in the New York State Department of Correctional Services isn’t prisoners, it is employees.

At Bedford Hills Correction Center in Westchester some employees will work double time, legally doubling or tripling their salaries.

In 2009, 28 corrections staffers and nurses made more than $100,000 because of overtime. Overtime at this one prison cost the state $1.7 million in 2009.

What I found interesting about this story was not the large amount of overtime pay that employees were accruing but rather the fact that prisons provide middle class jobs that have all but disappeared in this economy. This explains why the concept of abolishing prisons is even more of a uphill battle in the U.S. As Bill Clinton famously said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Next I found this article to be profoundly troubling.

Cash-strapped states are increasingly imposing a number of fees on poor criminal defendants, including fees for a public defender, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy and law institute affiliated with New York University’s Law School.

The report (PDF) found that of the 15 states with the largest prison populations, 13 allow low-income defendants to be charged fees for exercising their right to counsel. Some states even mandate these fees, meaning the court can’t waive the fee for even the poorest of defendants. In two states — Florida and Ohio —  individuals must pay defender fees even if they are acquitted or charges are dropped.

While these fees are used to boost revenue to the criminal justice system, their imposition raises “serious constitutional questions,” according to the report, which noted that the fees “often discourage individuals from exercising their constitutional right to an attorney — leading to wrongful convictions, over-incarceration, and significant burdens on the operation of courts.” These defender fees can come in several ways:

Defender fees can include charges to “apply” for representation before an attorney is appointed, charges during the course of a criminal proceeding to offset the costs of representation, and charges at the termination of a criminal proceeding to reimburse the state for all or a portion of the costs of representation.

But defender fees are just one of a number of the fees courts may impose on defendants throughout a criminal proceeding. Other fees states imposed included jail fees for incarceration prior to trial, prosecution reimbursement fees, prison fees, fees for court administrative costs, probation and parole fees, drug testing fees and mandatory treatment fees, in addition to fines dealt simply as punishment. Often, the fees continue to stack up when defendants are unable to pay off their criminal justice debts, or make their payments late.

“Every stage of the criminal justice process, it seems, has become ripe for a surcharge,” the report said. Many states deny ex-convicts voting or driving privileges if they miss payments or have not paid off such debt.

Not everyone thinks these fees are unfair. Jim Reams, president of the National District Attorneys Association, told USA Today that most criminal defendants don’t serve time and receive some form of probation, so “their job status and economics can and should change relatively quickly,” allowing them to pay off their debts.

 

Finally, the logical extension of all of this is that we are now incarcerating people in debtor’s prisons.  The ACLU has just released a report about this issue:

Incarcerating people simply because they cannot afford to pay their legal debts not only is unconstitutional but it has a devastating impact upon men and women, whose only crime is that they are poor. The sad truth is that debtors’ prisons are flourishing today, more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts. This report seeks to document the realities of today’s debtors’ prisons and to provide state and local governments and courts with a more sensible path – one where they no longer will be compelled to fund their criminal justice systems on the backs of the poor, and one where the promise of equal protection under the law for the poor and affluent alike will finally be realized.