every state except Hawaii charges inmates per day for the time they are incarcerated, at rates that vary from $20 to $80/day
They have to, just to keep the lights on. We incarcerate more than .07% of our national population at any one time, and that number which has been climbing over the last decade... despite many states overtly trying to reduce sentences and expand bail and probation. Government funding alone cannot feed, house, and medicate 2 million people on a permanent basis on the skinflint budgets prisons are actually given. We will almost certainly see the expected "contribution" prisoners are billed multiply in scale over the next few years, as prison budgets continue to shrink and prison population continues to explode. Half of our government tries to use mass imprisonment as a solution to nearly every social ill imaginable, and the other Party "looks the other way" far more often than they try to confront prison reform directly. Whether pro or anti, prison reform is not, and has never been, a winning issue with voters. People don't like to vote about things they'd prefer not to think about, and they are quick to shoot the messenger.
I note that charging prisoners for their "hotel stay" is not a very
efficient way to pay the bills; very few prisoners are actually capable of paying their obligation away, and most states don't actively pursue them as it would cost more to do so than they would get in return. But they will place a lien that allows them to claim "back" their money should a former prisoner come into any sort of financial success later down the line. Some ex-inmates don't so much as realize the lien (or even the bill) is there until the government recovers their share from, say, the payout from a later lawsuit, or state lottery win. One of the many quiet ways we encourage recidivism through policy. This sort of thing happens often enough to offset the leaking of prison budgets to some degree, even if the expected rate of repayment is tiny.
