Very weird that I am so old and have literally never heard this mentioned in a TV show or book or movie or anything.
In four out of five states, if you go to prison, you are literally paying for the time you spend there.
As you can guess, this results in crippling debt as soon as you're released.
The county gets back a fraction of what they hold over your head the rest of your life until you commit suicide(or die naturally and peacefully with the sword of damocles hanging over your head).
$20-$80 a day according to Rutgers.
Counties apparently sue people and employ wage garnishment to get back the money that majority of people obviously cannot pay back.
Trying to offset the cost of a societal need by charging fees to prisons (sic) doesn’t even make any sense.
Sure it does. It costs $$$ to build jails and prisons and more $$$ to run them. Why should I, the victim, have to pay twice? (once for my car, which the thief stole, and again in my taxes to fund the legal system once the thief is caught)
I can very much entertain an argument like that (counter-argument, pay prisoners minimum wage for whatever work they do and charge the $20/day from that).
But that's not what's going on here.
This is about a collection agency figuring out how to profit from a captive audience. It deserves the same regard from us as prison phone operators do.
It's really just another form of predatory bullshit.
The prisons themselves say they aren’t a significant revenue stream
This is crucial here, IMO. We could put whatever we want on the bills -- hell, we could charge a million dollar fee for each sentence! That would fix the funding problems -- but the simple truth is that most of the prisoners don't have the money.