The day Tarra Simmons walked out of Mission Creek Correctional Center for Women in 2013, she owed $7,500 to Kitsap County in Washington state. These court-mandated fines and fees, known as legal financial obligations, or LFOs, included charges for “services” she had “rendered” — police, court, public defender, DNA collection — and some line items unrelated to her case, such as expert witnesses and victims’ services. (Her case had no named victim.) Simmons had spent the previous 20 months of her incarceration on drug, theft, and firearm charges trying to pay down that debt. But her prison job paid only 42 cents an hour, and even with the state putting a portion of the money her family sent in for commissary toward her mounting tab, it was impossible to keep up with the 12 percent interest that began accruing the day she was convicted.
[For more of this story, written by Arvind Dilawar, go to https://psmag.com/legal-financ...-prison-5e9c4f0fab83]
Comments (0)