Pay now, pay later: states impose prison peonage.

Kenneth Stewart ST. is distressed. His son, Kenny, is on Virginia's death row and owes the state $57,756.20 for the cost of his jury trial--not his defense, but his whole trial. In Virginia, a jury trial is still a right, but one that losing defendants must literally pay for.

"Last week I sent $50 up to Kenny's account and there wasn't but six cents left in it after the authorities took their share," Stewart says.

Complicating matters are Kenny Stewart's abscessing teeth. "They charge fifty bucks to pull teeth, and Kenny needs most of his taken out," says the senior Stewart, who receives $850 a month in social security and wages as a part-time security guard. Every month he sends $200 to his son Kenny's prison account in the hopes that Kenny's teeth will be worked on.

On top of the $50 "co-payments" for medieval-style dental extractions, Kenny--like prisoners throughout the nation--must buy his own toiletries, underwear, socks, cigarettes, and stationery. Due to the notoriously bad prison food, most prisoners are forced to supplement the official diet with the occasional can of tuna fish or soup mix from the commissary. But with a $57,000 debt around his neck, and a mouth full of dental bills, Kenny Stewart goes without the basics as he awaits execution.

Kenny Stewart's predicament is emblematic of a trend in American prisons to shift the costs of incarceration onto prisoners. Throughout the country, state corrections departments are squeezing whatever funds possible from the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans. Prisons extract money from their inmates by charging for court costs, imposing medical co-payments, seizing prisoners' assets, garnishing prisoners' wages, and pursuing former prisoners for the cost of their incarceration.

In Virginia, the accounting of justice is a picayune affair. Stewart and the 1,684 other Virginia, prisoners who are paying the costs of their trials are, upon their defeat in court, slapped with an itemized bill that includes these standard charges: $100 forensics fee, $200 sentencing fee, $2 courthouse-maintenance fee, $65 court-reporter's fee, $12 sheriff's fee, $32.50 clerk's fee, $265 felony fee. And the most bizarre charge of all, as Stewart's lawyer David Baugh points out, is the "jury lunch fec." "If they get beanie weenies, you get a break. If they get shrimp, you're screwed," says Baugh.

The minimum cost to a losing defendant is $720 for the first day of trial. After that the cost drops to $360 per day, or $30 per juror. Last year, Virginia collected $36 million in court fees--and that was for trial costs, not fines.

This arcane Virginia law, recently resurrected by get-tough legislators, is coming under-increasing legal pressure. Baugh and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are planning to sue, arguing that charging for a jury trial violates the, Constitution's Sixth Amendment (the right to a jury trial) and Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection under the law). No other state charges for criminal jury trials, though the National Center for State Courts,reports that twenty-six states charge court fees in civil cases. Nonetheless, the Virginia attorney general's office defends its position. "Just because we're the only one that does it doesn't mean it's wrong," said spokesperson Mark Miner in a recent news report.

To help recoup a small portion of booming prison-construction costs, and to throw a bone to a vengeful public, many states enforce a pay-to-stay policy for inmates.

From small county jails to maximum-security state penitentiaries, inmates are being forced to pay room and board while they're locked away. According to an ACLU National Prison Project survey, twenty-one of the nation's state prison systems require at least some inmates to make payments toward room and board. Often the rule applies only to inmates employed in prison industries or by private firms that use prison labor. Such jobs pay between fifty cents and $4.25 an hour, with between 25 and 50 percent of the inmate's wages going toward room and board. However, many states and counties are beginning to charge regardless of a prisoner's ability to pay.

Michigan has one of the more established pay-to-stay programs. Relying on a previously dormant, sixty-year-old law known as the Prisoners Reimbursement Act, the Michigan attorney general's office has launched an aggressive campaign of lawsuits against inmates it deems able to pay the $40-a-day cost of their incarceration.

In 1994 the state collected $400,000 from prison inmates' bank accounts and pensions. And every year the Department of Corrections collects up to $1 million in rent from prisoners in halfway houses and prison work camps. "Taxpayers like the idea that we don't allow prisoners to profit from their crimes," says Attorney General Frank Kelley.

But not everyone agrees. Louise Grable contended that the state was unfair when it took 90 percent of her sixty-three-year-old, incarcerated husband's $398 monthly General Motors pension. He's currently serving three to sixteen years for sexually molesting a young girl, and he left his wife with no income other than the pension.

"I know what my husband did was wrong and he's paying for it, but I don't think that it's right for the state to walk right in and take everything," says Louise Grable, who is sixty-two. After a lengthy court case, she managed to have the pension deductions reduced.

In 1994, Michigan passed a similar law that will now charge up to $60 a day for room and board in county jails. Prisoners will also start paying for doctor visits and will soon face a "utility tax" on TVs, radios, and the other electrical appliances they use in their cells.

A bill in the California state assembly seeks to charge inmates $15 a day for room and board.

In Nevada, inmates, upon sentencing, are forced to disclose personal assets and to agree to Pay a portion of the cost of their incarceration. Nevada prisoners who work Pay from 20 to 50 percent of their wages for room and board. Mental-health services and emergency procedures can also drain a prisoner's account. If a prisoner incurred a few large expenses at the beginning of incarceration, "a guy could be stuck without any money for his whole stay," says Glen Whorton of the Nevada Department of Prisons. That, of course, means years without soap, socks, cigarettes, or stationery. "Hey, stay out of jail," says Whorton.

Increasingly, individual wardens and county sheriffs are devising such programs on their own, without approval from state governments.

In April 1994, the warden of Berks County prison in Pennsylvania began charging his prisoners for room and board. In the first six months, the prison collected $85,000 from 2,000 inmates; today the total is $295,000. Berks County prison now charges $10 per day, or 25 percent of costs. By mid-1995, other prisons in Pennsylvania were following suit.

In some cases, the prisons are even pursuing former prisoners for the cost of their incarceration.

Upon release from Berks County prison, former inmates have thirty days to set up a payment plan for their outstanding debts. When former inmates fail to pay, their cases are referred to Capax Credit Control. Between 1994 and 1995, 675 cases were forwarded to Capax.

Last year, Lancaster County jail joined the fray and started charging prisoners $10 a day for room and board. "It won't be a free ride any more," said Warden Vincent Guarini. Lancaster's policy even goes so far as to charge former inmates for presentencing time.

As in other Pennsylvania institutions, former inmates of Lancaster are given thirty days to pay their debts, after which their case is handed to a private collection agency. So far, these Pennsylvania peonage policies have survived all legal challenges in circuit courts.

In Missouri, post-prison peonage is now state law. Last year, the Department of Corrections was authorized to take "10 percent of any wages, salary, benefits, or payments from any source." This lien on prisoners' assets and wages applies not only while a person is incarcerated but for "five years from the date that the offender is released."

In what passes for mercy among Missouri legislators, the law states: "Not more than 90 percent of the value of the assets of the offender may be used for the purposes of securing costs and reimbursement." The Missouri law will make failure to pay one's incarceration-related debts a violation of parole.

In a recent letter to The Progressive, prisoner Ricky Davis argued that the law will merely "ensure that re-entry into society is even more difficult for ex-cons" and that the wage attachments will lead to further poverty and thus more crime and recidivism. Davis also points out that former prisoners already pay for prisons--as does everyone else--with taxes.

One of the most inhumane policy innovations sweeping the corrections establishment is the introduction of co-payments for medical care, dental work, and mental-health services. These small (but, for prisoners, nonetheless expensive) fees are usually introduced with the stated aim of "deterring frivolous health complaints."

In October 1995, Allen County, Kentucky, started charging $10 for a doctor's visit. Not surprisingly, the average number of monthly doctor visits plunged from 1,125 to 225.

According to a 1994 report in Corrections Forum magazine, a similar co-payment program in Mobile, Alabama, showed a 50 percent reduction in inmate visits to the clinic. Between 1989 and 1993, the Mobile County jail saw its inmate population double while its total medical expenses dropped from $883,000 to $262,000.

The same story emerges throughout the nation, from the San Diego County jail to numerous state prison systems. Florida charges $3 a visit; Oklahoma $2, plus $2 per prescription; California $5 (soon to be boosted to $10), plus up to 200 for dentures and over $60 for eyeglasses; Nevada $4, with the costs of medication and prosthetics running much higher.

"No one is actually denied treatment due to lack of funds," says Whorton of the Nevada Department of Prisons. Instead, "the prisoner's account goes into negative balance," and if someone is ultimately unable to pay, "the prisoner's welfare fund is charged." That fund is the repository of all prison canteen profits and is intended to be used for recreation and entertainment, such as buying basketballs, weights, and common-area televisions.

A similar practice holds true in many other states: Indigent inmates with no cash will have their accounts debited for medical costs and thus will be without any spending money until all debts are paid.

Colorado state prisons had charged $3 per visit, but the practice was found unconstitutional and amended. Now prisoners are charged only for a second opinion.

The Orleans Parish jail in Louisiana had been charging $3 to $5 for over-the-counter medication but this practice was likewise enjoined.

But other states have overcome numerous legal challenges. In Maryland, Prison Legal News reports, a prisoner named Jerome Johnson, who earned eighty-five cents a day and suffered from severe asthma, challenged the state's right to charge $4 to $40 for doctor visits and inhalers. The court threw out Johnson's case, holding that the inmate's inability to pay for the medication necessary for him to breathe freely was not cruel and unusual punishment.

One particularly harrowing incident occurred in Comanche County, Oklahoma, where a jail simply refused to pay for a pretrial inmate's cancer treatments. Only after the prisoner filed a federal lawsuit were the treatments allowed.

Prison activists and critics of medical co-payments point to the long-term irrationality of such policies. At first it seems to be a rational cost-cutting policy," says Jenni Gainsborough of the ACLU's National Prison Project. "But eventually prison administrators will be faced with widespread health crises. Even deadly contagious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis often start out as a rash or a cough. If something like tuberculosis is not treated promptly--especially in a prison--epidemics are inevitable."

In purely financial terms, attempts to make prisons self-sufficient will, and do, fail. Prisoners are drawn from the poorest sections of the population and even if they are gouged for every penny in prison and hounded for all of their postrelease lives by the debts of incarceration, they will never cough up enough money to pay for the overpriced, high-tech island of concrete in which they are kept. The main effect of squeezing funds from prisoners is to justify the gargantuan costs of America's gulag, which grows larger every day.

RELATED ARTICLE: Inside the Prison Factory

The ultimate in prison self-sufficiency is the prison as factory. This was the stated aim of Chief Justice Warren Burger, who in the 1970s urged Congress to turn prisons into "factories with fences." As part of the 1979 Justice Improvement Act, Congress established the Justice Department's Prison Industries Enhancement (PIE) program. Under PIE it again became legal for private corporations to employ prison labor. This practice had been outlawed by New Deal legislation--the Hawes-Cooper Act and the Ashurst-Sumnor Act. The latter of these laws made transportation of prison-manufactured products across state lines a felony.

At first just a small-scale collection of pilot programs, PIE now licenses more than fifty "projects." Many states, most notably California, operate private prison-labor programs outside of PIE legislation and set their own rules for how firms can use prison labor.

California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington lead the nation in leasing prison labor to private firms, as states are moving toward a partnership with private industry.

Nevada provides a glimpse of what may lie ahead on the road to self-sufficient prisons. Nevada prisoners already do the following:

* Build Bentley Nevada circuit boards for nuclear power plants (thirteen to fifteen inmates employed).

* Make waterbeds for Vinyl Products (sixty-five inmates emploed).

* Restore cars fo Imperial Palace (thirty to forty inmates employed).

* Hand-assemble Shelby Cobra road cars (fifteen inmates employed).

* And, in a perfect reflection of the dual economy in the United States, another thirty inmates build stretch limousines for Emerald Coach.

Other Nevada operations include making mattresses and fitting out ambulances for state government use.

On average, Nevada collects $800,000 to $1 million a year in room and board. Howard Skolnik, assistant director of the Nevada Department of Prisons, says: "The only thing stopping our expansion is that we've used all available space."

Despite his enthusiasm for the prison industries, Skolnik acknowledges that "it defrays some costs, but not much."

In Washington state, a company called Exmark uses a "flexible" pool of prison laborers to package everything from Microsoft Windows 95 to Starbucks Coffee products, JanSport gear, and literature for telecommunications giant US WEST, according to an article in The Stranger.

In Louisiana, Corrections Corporation of America--the largest private prison operator in the country, with, according to The Washington Post, profits of $4 million in 1993--has teamed up with the work-clothes manufacturer Company Apparel Safety Items (CASI). This is the first partnership between one of the nation's eighty-eight private prisons and a private manufacturer. The twenty-eight prisoners employerd by CASI receive the minimum wage minus a 30 percent deduction for their room and board.

In Arizona, the press reports that even the 109 residents of death row are now pulling their own weight on a prison-run vegetable farm. One of the positive side-effects of employing the condemned--as far as the governor's press secretary is concerned--is that the inmates will now be too busy to file "frivolous lawsuits in attempts to circumvent their death sentences."

Christian Parenti, a student at the London School of Economics, has written about prison labor for The Nation.