Or in a growing number of other municipalities – in states like California, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire – which are always on the lookout for new ways to raise revenue. Placer County, Calif., just started charging $71.36 a day. Everything costs more in California: you even have to pay part of your medical bills. Except for emergencies or ongoing conditions like AIDS, the California Department of Corrections makes inmates statewide pony up a $5 co-payment for each medical appointment. The theory is that inmates will think twice before asking to visit the doctor.
The Feds want a piece of the action, too. Starting a year ago, after congressional authorization, the attorney general ordered that new inmates of federal prisons be hit with a one-time charge of $21,352 – the government’s estimate of the cost of a single year behind bars. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons didn’t disclose the number who actually come up with that kind of money. But it’s a good bet most of them don’t have the balance sheet of a Michael Milken.
That’s the problem, of course, with any inmate-restitution plan: getting the miscreants to pay. City Council president Steve Gallegos, who voted against Albuquerque’s experiment, says it will be ““an administrative nightmare.’’ In lieu of writing a check, inmates can work off their debt through such community service as picking up trash and washing buses. The going rate: $5 an hour, which means a full workday – eight hours – just to keep the ledger even. Those who refuse to work will get a bill on their release; if they don’t make good, the tab will be turned over to a collection agency. ““All I can say is good luck to the person trying to collect,’’ says Evangeline Montoya of the public defender’s office. County officials estimate that two thirds of the local inmates are indigent.
Nobody’s suggesting a debtors’ prison yet. After all, how would they collect revenue from its inmates?
