What It's Like To Be In Debt to the State

Inside the lives of five people who have served their time, but are still paying for their crimes.

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What if you committed a crime, got caught, and served time? Most people would say you had paid your debt to society. But for certain drug, property, and violent crimes, incarceration is frequently accompanied by a fine—with the first payment typically due right after you walk out of prison.

In Florida, for instance, an individual caught selling just seven grams of oxycodone (the equivalent of roughly 14 five-milligram Percocet pills) can receive a three-year mandatory minimum prison sentence and a $50,000 fine. Fifty five-milligram Percocet pills—less than a month’s prescription in some cases—will set you back 15 years and an extraordinary $500,000.

Legal financial obligations, which include fines, court user fees, restitution, and collection charges, exist in every state, in Washington, D.C., and at the federal level. These fines and fees were built into state and federal laws for a variety of reasons: sometimes to serve as a deterrent, sometimes to provide compensation for victims, and sometimes purely because someone thought incarceration wasn’t punishment enough. According to sociologist Alexes, author of A Pound of Flesh (Russell Sage Foundation), legal debts are also imposed on people “to help reimburse the state for costs resulting from their criminal behavior, including the costs of arresting,prosecuting, and punishing them.” That’s right: individuals are sometimes forced to pay the state for nabbing them and locking them up.

Jurisdictions across the United States typically base monetary sanctions on offense type—either set by statutes or through judicial discretion—and do not take a defendant’s ability to pay into consideration; the same $10,000 fine could be a slap on the wrist for a rich man, but a harsh sentence for a poor one.