 |
| By KEVIN DREXEL Jun 28, 2025 |
One practice in Virginia jails that perpetuates the cycle of incarceration is the practice of “Keep Fees” or charging inmates daily rent.
We are led to believe that public funds cover all the costs of incarceration and the operation of our jails. However, jails shift many of these costs onto inmates and their families through excessive fees charged to inmates and through inflated private contracts with private vendors. Vendors commonly offer kickbacks (“bribery”) for signing them up.
A significant percentage of costs for rent, food, communications, hygiene products, and clothing are ultimately passed on to families trying to assist loved ones with basic material and other needs while incarcerated.
Hadar Aviram, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, comments, “Public prisons are public only by name. These days, you pay for everything in prison.”
According to the Brennan Center, the result is “an estimated 10 million people who owe more than $50 billion resulting from their involvement in the criminal justice system.”
As a 2021 Vera Institute report clarifies, “Fees are not the same as fines. Fines are intended to serve as punishment, whereas fees and surcharges are explicitly designed to raise revenue for the government.
But both fines and fees bring governments revenue as if they were taxes, and this method of funding government inflicts considerable harm on already impoverished communities.”
Examples of proliferating fees, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, are “charges for police transport, case filing, felony surcharges, electronic monitoring, drug testing, and sex offender registration.”
Among the more egregious of these are keep fees, the daily rent jails across the country charge inmates while incarcerated. In Virginia, these run from $1 per day at our local jail to $3 at Middle River Regional Jail, the maximum allowed in the Commonwealth. Such fees disproportionately harm low-income families as the median annual income of a person incarcerated hovers around $19,000. Thus, the multiple jail fees charged could be seen as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s constitutional protection against excessive fines.
In a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that excessive fines were used after the Civil War to re-enslave freed men. In 2019, the New York Times published an article titled “Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment- Both still define our criminal-justice system,” in which the author notes that we cannot understand the excessive punishment that permeates the U.S. mass incarceration system without understanding its roots in the legacy of slavery. The article further states, “Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people, making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.”
It was in the early 1990s that a Chicago law clerk wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune suggesting that inmates with financial assets should earn their room and board through prison labor and pay rent to cover the increased costs of operating jail and prison facilities due to overcrowding.
One of the results of this fee system is that when someone is released from jail or prison, they are often deeply in debt and have very few financial resources. This only perpetuates the cycle of incarceration by burdening former inmates and their families and by creating hurdles that prevent them from successfully reintegrating into society.
Brittany Friedman, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has done extensive research that shows that jail debt increases the cost of incarceration and that the devastating effects of jail debt can be far-reaching. Dr. Friedman states, “If pay-to-stay is really meant to offset the costs of incarcerating people, then why are we sticking them with a bill that then further tethers them to the system?”
Keep fees may also contribute to inmates on meager jail fares going hungry while incarcerated since any attempt by friends or family to add money to their commissary account to supplement their diet is partially seized by the jail to offset the keep fee debt. This exacerbates hunger and mental distress and is clearly wrong.
Fortunately, some state and national groups are working to address some of the injustices of excessive fees in jails and prisons, but regrettably, this has not been true of jails in the Valley.
Kevin Drexel is the founder of Stand 4 Count, working to support the needs of individuals, families, and marginalized groups impacted by incarceration, and is a part of the local Valley Justice Coalition, a local citizen voice for criminal justice reform in our community and in the Commonwealth since 2014.
Kevin Drexel is the founder of Stand 4 Count, working to support the needs of individuals, families, and marginalized groups impacted by incarceration, and is a part of the local Valley Justice Coalition, a local citizen voice for criminal justice reform in our community and in the Commonwealth