New Role for U.S. Prisons: Rent Collector

Along with the Sheaffer plant across the street, where writing instruments are manufactured, the oldest prison west of the Mississippi River helped give this town its nickname of “Pen City.”

Inside the limestone walls and crenelated towers of the Iowa State Penitentiary, each of the 550 maximum-security inmates gets his own seven-foot by eight-foot cell, complete with bunk, small toilet, table and stool.

Those in lock-down run laps inside a narrow yard; the rest have access to a basketball court, free weights and a baseball diamond. A typical lunch might include three ounces of cold cuts, a half-cup of kidney bean salad, a lettuce leaf, mayo and a hoagie bun.

For all this history, activity, shelter and food, the state of Iowa has begun to charge a fee: $5 a month, a moderate tariff, one might think, especially with taxpayers spending $192 million a year on corrections.

Iowa’s Legislature believes inmates ought to help carry the load that they helped create, adding the state to a growing roster of penal institutions that have stretched the definition of paying your debt to society.

For more than two years now, from the Berks County jail in Pennsylvania to the Macomb County jail in Michigan, rates have ranged as high as $10 a day. Some prisons have even hired collection agencies to get the back rent from convicts who finish their sentences or make parole while owing money.

So Iowa lawmakers took $302,500 from the corrections budget this past spring and told prison officials to get it back from the convicts. “Every state’s looking for ways that they can cut budgets, and this is a way to show that they’re getting tough on crime at the same time,” said Fred Scaletta, a Department of Corrections official in Des Moines.

The first rent was due Friday, Aug. 1. It was automatically deducted from inmate bank accounts.

The reckoning was supposed to come sooner, in July. But in a prison economy, even such small sums could quickly wipe out a convict’s nest egg, and Iowa’s new corrections director decided to delay implementation until he could review all objections leveled by critics of the new fees cropping up nationwide.

Charges--for room and board and for other services such as medical visits-- are “happening more, and it’s quite likely to be downright harmful,” said Jenni Gainsborough, public policy administrator of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. “Give people some incentive to integrate back in the community; don’t leave them so poor when they get out that crime is a temptation again.”

There was no doubt about the prisoners’ reaction. “They’re getting a little edgy,” said Ronald G. Weldon, assistant to the warden at Fort Madison.

Elsewhere in Iowa’s prison system, inmates threatened a sit-down strike. Another 17 prisoners filed a class-action suit contesting the decision.

One plaintiff is Michael Herlein, State No. 0205478, three years and seven months into a 15-year sentence for forgery. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Herlein said in a phone call from Anamosa State Prison. Prisoners, he noted, tend to be poor.

Many Iowa prisoners work some type of institutional job--in the laundry, for instance, or tending the landscaped grounds. But their wages fall in the range of $10 to $60 a month. At Fort Madison, the unemployed (some 300 prisoners) get “idle pay” of $7.70 a month.

Already, 20% is withheld for restitution to victims. Some have child support deducted as well. They must buy toiletries at the prison commissary ($1.17 for Pepsodent, $2.49 for Sensodyne; 40 cents for Ivory soap and 68 cents for Irish Spring). Stamped envelopes--for letters to loved ones, to attorneys and to the courts--must be purchased at the canteen as well.

Last year, the state instituted a medical and dental co-pay plan, $3 per inmate-initiated visit.

Prisoner assets vary enormously. Well before the new charges loomed, inmate bank accounts ranged from $43.20 in the red to a high of $1,189.68, according to documents from a 1993 lawsuit. A generous family or a prison-industry job (work for an outside firm that pays minimum wage) could make a big difference.

But balances from $6 to $10 appeared to be the norm.

So the rent rule was revised before taking effect. No Fort Madison prisoner will have to pay an amount that forces his savings to dip below $8. (If he has $10, for example, the state will deduct $2 rather than $5. But if his folks send $25 the next week, Weldon said, “we’ll go in and collect the rest then.”)

Herlein, rankled, thinks the public is sloughing off responsibility.

“The taxpayers want the punishment of incarceration, yet basically they don’t want to foot the bills,” he said. “Perhaps they should consider alternative sentencing then.”