Did You Know You Have to Pay to Go to Prison?

And yes, that’s exactly as messed up as it sounds.

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I was today years old when I found out that people in jail and prison are being billed for their incarceration.
Not the phone calls. Not the ramen packets or toothpaste. I’m talking about the stay itself.
They call it Pay-to-Stay.

It sounds like a luxury hotel chain gone sideways, except the points don’t get you free nights, they get you lifelong debt.

I’m flabbergasted.

In many states, inmates are charged daily “room and board” fees, anywhere from $20 to $60 a day. Do the math on a six-month sentence and you’re walking out owing thousands of dollars to the same system that just locked you up. And if you can’t pay? You can be sent back, or your wages, tax refunds, and even family assets can be seized to cover the debt.

You do the time, and then you get the bill.

I thought debtor’s prison went away a century ago.
Turns out, not really. The old version, where you went to jail just for owing money, is mostly gone. But this? This is the modern version in everything but name. The Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that you can’t jail someone solely for being too poor to pay a fine, but many states still use civil liens and wage garnishments to collect prison “room and board” debts after release.¹ It’s the same cruelty, just better paperwork.

Here’s what shocked me most: this isn’t some rare loophole. It’s the rule.
At least 43 states let jails and prisons charge people for their own incarceration.² A newer Axios investigation puts the number closer to 48 states.³ Only California and Illinois have actually banned the practice. Everywhere else, the meter’s running.

And it’s not just the “room.” People pay for:

• Food: per-day meal charges are common. In Maricopa County, Arizona, it’s $1.25/day.⁴
• Medical visits: co-pays ranging from $5 to $100, depending on the state.⁵
• Phone calls: privatized, overpriced, and often profited from by the state.⁶
• Booking fees: some counties charge you for the privilege of being processed into jail.
• **Commissary markups, toiletries, clothing** all extra.

North Carolina inmates even paid $7 for an emergency medical visit, unless the staff later decides it was a real emergency.⁷

It’s hard to wrap your head around the moral logic here. If the purpose of prison is to punish and rehabilitate, how does billing people for it help either goal?

You can’t rebuild your life when you walk out owing thousands for the “room and board” you didn’t choose. You can’t get a job when a county collection agency is garnishing your wages. You can’t find housing when a court lien sits on your credit record.

Debt becomes the second sentence.

And here’s the part that really fries me: even if the state stopped doing this tomorrow, they’d still be paying the same cost to house inmates. They already are.

It’s not as if charging prisoners for their stay magically makes incarceration cheaper. The government still foots the bill; they just pretend to offset it by chasing people who have nothing to give. It costs more to send the invoices, track the accounts, and collect the debt than the program ever brings in.

In Michigan, they recover about 5% of what they bill. Five percent. Other states aren’t much better. In some counties, they spend more on collections than they ever see back in payments.⁸

And that’s before you even get to the human side, the people walking out of jail already behind the eight ball. Trying to find work, rent an apartment, feed their kids, all while a bill from the county follows them like a bad credit score.

So no, it’s not even an effective money-maker. It’s just one more layer of punishment, disguised as fiscal responsibility.

And somehow, this system still claims to be about justice.
Except justice isn’t supposed to recognize the shape of a dollar sign.

The rich can sometimes pay for cushier “private cells,” yes, that’s a thing, where they serve their time with Wi-Fi, order takeout, and wear their own clothes. Meanwhile, the poor get stripped, confined, and billed. The same state that can’t afford to fix the water system finds time to invoice the incarcerated.

It’s the moral contradiction of America in miniature: we say freedom isn’t free, but apparently neither is prison.

I can’t help wondering if we’ve built a justice system or just a profit model. Maybe both.
And maybe it’s time we stop pretending there’s a difference.

Have you ever heard of this? Because I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

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Footnotes

[1] Bearden v. Georgia, 461 U.S. 660 (1983) — The Court ruled defendants cannot be imprisoned solely for failure to pay fines or restitution without inquiry into ability to pay.
[2] Brennan Center for Justice: Paying Your Time — How Charging Inmates Fees Behind Bars May Violate the Constitution. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/paying-your-time-how-charging-inmates-fees-behind-bars-may-violate

[3] Axios: “Exclusive — 48 states let inmates pay for their own incarceration” (July 2025).
[4] Brennan Center for Justice, ibid..
[5] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/economics_of_incarceration/

[6] Equal Justice Initiative: FCC Delays Rate Reductions for Calls with People in Prison (2024).
[7] North Carolina Health News: Prison copays pose barrier for incarcerated people seeking medical care (Sept. 17, 2024).
[8] Pay to Stay: Jails in Michigan and across the country are billing people for time behind bars