Get into Jail Fee

In a reverse twist on the famous “Get out of jail free” Monopoly card, Arizona has elected to impose some of the costs associated with allowing prisoners to have visitors… on the visitors. “New legislation allows the department to impose a $25 fee on adults who wish to visit inmates at any of the 15 prison complexes that house state prisoners. The one-time ‘background check fee’ for visitors, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, has angered prisoner advocacy groups and family members of inmates, who in many cases already shoulder the expense of traveling long distances to the remote areas where many prisons are located.” New York Times, September 4^th. Oh, the Department can waive that cost, especially if the visit is just by phone, but the cost to most is very real.

It seems like a “little thing” to many. There was some deficit reduction mind-set with the legislators who voted for the fee, noting that the state is still staggering under a $1.6 billion shortfall, which for a state with 6.4 million people is massive. $25 didn’t seem too out of line for the privilege of visitation, even though the vast majority of the prison population comes from families at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Prisons are in disrepair and need the money, and background checks cost money: “The Public Safety Department charges $20 for criminal background checks of people who are hired as volunteers for state agencies, and $24 for checks on paid state workers, both of which involve fingerprinting. A fingerprint clearance card, required for child care and foster care workers in Arizona, costs $65 for volunteers and $69 for paid employees.” NY Times. Why should taxpayers have to shoulder this burden, ask many?

Nevertheless, it is a deterrent to those barely able to afford the trip, and the notion of straining inmates’ contacts with the outside world would seem to invite even more bitterness and might even serve to turn prisoners more towards the inmate value system and away from their families on the outside. Whether you believe this, the emotions attached to opposing the legislation run deep: “David C. Fathi, director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the fee ‘mind-boggling’ and said that while it was ostensibly intended to help the state — the money will be used to repair and maintain the prisons — it could ultimately have a negative effect on public safety… ‘We know that one of the best things you can do if you want people to go straight and lead a law-abiding life when they get out of prison is to continue family contact while they’re in prison,’ he said. ‘Talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish.’” NY Times.

But Arizona has a general reputation for callousness when it comes to incarceration. Case in point are the chain-gangs and tented prisons introduced by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who describes himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” and refers to his Phoenix-area Tent City as a concentration camp. He is wildly popular in this neck of the woods, where the temperature can run north of 100 degrees every day for a month in a row during this county’s famously blisteringly scalding summers: “On July 2, 2011, when the temperature in Phoenix hit 118 °F (48 °C), Arpaio measured the temperature inside Tent City at 145 °F (63 °C). Some inmates complained that fans near their beds were not working, and that their shoes were melting from the heat.” Wikipedia. Sheriff Joe endeared himself in the recent legislation making it vastly easier to stop and question folks who seemed to be undocumented aliens, championing that bill. With drug cartel wars spilling across the border from Mexico, many have cheered this law.

But you might actually might think that if cost-savings were really the goal, legislators might have drilled down on reducing the prison population itself. Like the rest of the United States, about a quarter of incarcerated inmates are in prison for direct drug-related crimes, and another quarter of the inmates are there in part because of drug use. Arizona’s not too big on rehab, and so many of the locals do like their jails and their Wild West reputation for toughness. They waited until 2006 to enact their “persistent offender” statute (commonly known as the “three strikes” law), and the jails are brimming with convicts. Maybe they need to reign in some of that bravado to fall within their waning ability to afford their criminal justice system.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I can never get over the fact that for a country that accounts for only about 5% of the world’s population, we have 25% of the world’s incarcerated inmates.