State no longer allowed to seize assets of prison inmates

Tucked inside the bill that allowed the state to take over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was bipartisan provisions ending the practice of seizing assets from incarcerated people that are unrelated to their crimes.

Known as the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act, the law was passed in 1988, when any idea intended to make life harder for criminals received a favorable hearing. Now, the law is viewed as a violation of property rights and a barrier to a law-abiding life.

“We need to pay our debts to society,” state Rep. Tara Peters, a Rolla Republican, said in an interview with The Missouri Independent. “Those who have paid their debt to society should have every opportunity to have a fresh start and to get out on the right foot when it comes time to go back into society.”

Peters sponsored a bill with the repeal, as did state Sen. Stephen Webber, a Columbia Democrat. It was added to the St. Louis police takeover bill to persuade Democrats in the Senate to end a filibuster.

Once enacted, it is one of two bills that will allow people under the control of the state to keep assets they would use when released. The other stops the state from taking foster children’s Social Security benefits to cover the cost of foster care.

The incarceration reimbursement law was intended to take money from inmates to cover the cost of maintaining them in prison. The most recovered over the past five years is $523,000 in fiscal 2024, while the cost of operating the Department of Corrections is greater than $1 billion.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the law brought in only $136,000.

“People who are incarcerated by the state should not have to pay like it’s a hotel or an Airbnb,” said Amy Malinowski, director of the Missouri office of the MacArthur Justice Center. “It’s a prison. It’s the state’s responsibility to maintain those prisons, not the people who are detained there.”

Missouri has laws allowing prosecutors to seize assets gained in a criminal enterprise, and the courts can enforce restitution for stolen or damaged property as part of a sentence. The incarceration reimbursement act allows the attorney general to seek other assets, such as a family inheritance or proceeds from the sale of a house, that are unrelated to the crime.

Missouri’s prisons hold about 24,000 people. In any given year, about 11,000 will be released on parole or because they have completed their sentence. 

The goal of prison is to punish and to prepare inmates to live within society’s rules, said state Rep. Brad Christ, a Republican from St. Louis County who sponsored the St. Louis police bill and chaired a committee where Peters’ bill was discussed.

The seized money can be an important part of avoiding a return to prison, he said.

“Whatever it may be, whether it’s two grand, 20 grand or 200 grand,” Christ said, “to knock someone down a peg while they are in prison, I thought, was a little unjust after their sentence has been fulfilled.”

This article originally appeared here.