OLYMPIA — A Monroe lawmaker wants to keep state prison inmates from buying soap, aspirin and potato chips and leaving taxpayers with the bill.
Republican Rep. Kirk Pearson said offenders don’t pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchases each year and the state can no longer afford to cover their debts.
“That’s a whole lot of money in an economy like this,” Pearson said. “We need to talk about this.”
He’ll get a chance today in a hearing on his bill to ban public funds from being used to pay for an inmate’s “purchase of personal goods” through a credit or subsidy.
The hearing on House Bill 1121 is set for 10 a.m. in the Committee on Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness. TVW will provide a live webcast at www.tvw.org.
“My goal is to have us stop subsidizing prisoners who are getting candy and cigarettes at the (prison) commissary and not paying for them,” he said. “If they’re not paying anything back at all, why should the state be subsidizing it?”
Each prison facility sells goods through a storelike set-up in which inmates place orders on paper and the items are delivered to their cells.
Each prisoner has an account into which is deposited money received from family and friends, or earnings from a job in a prison industry. Many inmates are indigent because those dollars must go to pay fines, victim compensation and child support before they can be spent in any other way.
Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail said only indigent inmates are allowed to buy items from the store on credit. And, under department rules, they can only purchase personal hygiene supplies and over-the-counter medication from an approved list that does not include snack food and cigarettes.
Personal supplies include items such as soap, toothpaste, denture adhesive, razors and shampoo. Medical needs include reading glasses, aspirin, Claritin and Pepto-Bismol.
“If you don’t have money, you don’t have money,” he said. “We need them to wash. We need them to bathe. We need them to keep their dentures in their mouth. If we’re not providing aspirin in this way, they’ll wind up going to the doctor and getting aspirin, which is more expensive.”
The amount covered by the state for this store debt fluctuates year-to-year.
Inmates paid $150,000 of the $593,000 cost of supplies and medication they bought in the fiscal year that ended June 30, Vail said.
In the fiscal year before that, inmate purchases totaled $366,000 and they paid $152,000 or about 42 percent, he said.
Over the past five years, indigent prisoners paid about a third and the state covered the rest, Vail said. Overall, since record keeping began, inmates have compiled nearly $2.9 million in store debt.
There are other ways indigent inmates pile up debt. For example, they are entitled to receive five stamped envelopes a month and, if they are engaged in legal action they may get documents copied at taxpayer expense.
Inmates who are not indigent are the ones who can buy candy, cigarettes or even a television, he said.
Vail isn’t surprised the store debt is targeted by lawmakers. He’s been directed to carve roughly $48 million from his agency’s budget this year and some lawmakers want to find different places to save.
“It is an area we can look at,” he said.
Rep. Christopher Hurst, D-Enumclaw, the committee’s chairman who scheduled the hearing, is also a sponsor of the bill.
“Certainly we want to make sure prisoners aren’t incurring debt at the expense of the state’s taxpayers,” he said. “We also want to be sure not to impede the Department of Corrections’ ability to manage the prison system. It’s going to be a balancing act.”
Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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