Readjusting to life after incarceration is challenging. It’s harder when a person owes the state money for the time they spent behind bars.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Ginny Monk to discuss her article written with Andrew Brown, “They served their time in prison. Then the bills arrived.” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read their story here.
WSHU: Hello, Ginny. You and your Connecticut Mirror colleague, Andrew Brown, were inspired to investigate this issue during one of the busiest times of the legislative session, when you came across the story of a man whose daughter, Mimi Torres-Garcia, had died of severe child abuse and starvation in a mother’s care. That case had received prominent media coverage, and he was suing the state on behalf of her estate, but Victor Torres had a prison debt. Could you tell us about that?
GM: Yes, as I was reading through some of the filings in the lawsuit and in the probation case, because this case was filed on behalf of the estate of Mimi Torres, technically making it an inheritance that he would receive if he wins his lawsuit against the state, I came across a filing that didn’t make sense to me from the Department of Administrative Services saying he owed several $1,000 for the cost of his incarceration, and this was just a concept I’d never heard of before.
WSHU: Why was prison debt an issue? How did the law come about?
GM: The state of Connecticut in 1995 passed a law that allowed the Department of Correction to assess a daily fine to everyone who’s incarcerated, and then later charge them for the totality of that incurred cost. So Victor owed, as I said, several $1,000. And what we found through reporting this story was that Connecticut has one of the highest costs of incarceration in the country.
WSHU: Now the reason why they did this at that time, the crime rate was pretty high, and the prison population was expanding. You went back to the arguments that were made to implement this law, and this law was implemented at a time when we had a Republican governor who had campaigned on being tough on crime. So, could you just tell us a little bit about the framing that produced this law?
GM: Right. So we had a Republican governor, as you mentioned at the time, who really during his gubernatorial campaign said, “I’m going to be tough on crime. We’re going to get this under control,” and that was kind of something that we were hearing nationally from politicians. It was very popular to be tough on crime. So as that was happening, Connecticut passed this law. Part of the thought was we can recoup some of the money that we are spending on the cost to incarcerate all of these people, a growing number of people, and part of it was they wanted to teach them personal responsibility.
WSHU: Even at that time, there were warnings that this was not a population that could afford to pay for their incarceration, and yet that was not taken into consideration at the time.
GM: Right, as early as 1990, the Department of Correction commissioner at the time was saying, “We’ve researched this idea, and this population cannot afford to pay. It’s not financially feasible for them. It’s going to be hard to collect this money.” They went ahead with the law anyway, and kind of the results we’re seeing today are some of what people were warned about in 1990 that folks who have been incarcerated can’t afford to pay this debt, that it’s hard to collect, that it takes a lot of time.
WSHU: Now, could you tell us about some of the other cases that you came across. Like Tracy DeSenti, for instance, lost her home because the state went after her for money she owed for being incarcerated.
GM: Tracy DeSenti was one of several people we spoke to who had significant financial loss, and you’re right. She lost her home after her husband passed away. The state came to collect what he owed for the cost of his incarceration. What that meant for Tracy was that she had to sell the house because she wasn’t going to receive enough to pay off his debt without doing so. And now she’s living in a rental where she pays much more in rent than she paid in more in her mortgage.
WSHU: So let’s talk about how much the state has been able to recoup, and in the scheme of things, what that means for the state’s budget.
GM: So on average, since 2020, the state has been able to recoup about $3.3 million a year, which I think to the average person sounds like a lot of money. To the state, it is a tiny fraction of a percent of what they spend annually. And I think the key thing is that to the people they’re collecting it from, it’s life changing amounts of money.
WSHU: It could make the difference between having a home and being homeless.
GM: Right, we saw that in several cases that people lost their homes.
WSHU: And basically they become more dependent on the state.
GM: Yeah, one of the women we spoke to after she had to pay off this debt ended up having to go on SNAP benefits because she was counting on that money to support herself as she aged, and now she can’t afford to.
WSHU: I was kind of interested in a quote from the Department of Administrative Services when you asked them why they were so aggressive in going after the prison debt, and basically their response was: We’re not involved in the policy; we just are the ones that implement the law, and they’re doing their job. So the problem here is a political problem that has to be solved by lawmakers. In the past couple of years, they’ve tried to do some things. What have they tried to do, and why is that not enough?
GM: So, in 2022, they actually set out to repeal the law, and as that made its way through the legislative process, that was sort of watered down until it became sort of minor changes to collections from lawsuits. It was limiting what the state could collect from most of the formerly incarcerated population, with the exception of people who had committed the most serious violent offenses. There were a couple other small tweaks in 2024, but ultimately they haven’t been able to repeal the law like so many other states have.
WSHU: Okay, Ginny, thank you so much.
GM: Thank you.