NEW HAVEN — Is it fair for the state to charge someone up to $249 a day — more than $90,000 a year — to pay the cost of a prison term that they may have served and put behind them decades ago?
A federal judge will soon decide.
Lawyers for the state and plaintiffs suing the state in the class-action Beatty v. Lamont case gave oral arguments in the case Monday in U.S. District Court.
Assistant Attorneys General Benjamin Abrams and Robert Deichert called for U.S. District Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer to dismiss the case, claiming that the named plaintiffs, including Teresa Beatty and Michael Llorens, lacked standing to sue, as well as on the merits of the case.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, led by David Slossberg of Hurwitz, Sagarin, Slossberg & Knuff and Dan Barrett, legal director for the ACLU Foundation of Connecticut, argued, meanwhile, that the state’s prison debt law is unfair and excessive and it disproportionately falls on Black and Latinx people in Connecticut.
They asked for it to be declared unenforceable.
Judge Meyer, who did not rule Monday, appeared to see some of both sides.
“Let’s say I agree with you,” he told the plaintiffs’ lawyers. He nevertheless said, “I’m struggling ” to understand “where it’s grossly inappropriate.”
In the case of Beatty, a Stamford woman who did time on drug charges from 2000 to 2002 — and is now a certified nursing assistant, mother and grandmother, as well as a caretaker for her disabled older brother, the state demanded $83,762.26 for the time she was incarcerated after her mother died in 2020.
Beatty’s mother left Beatty a portion of the home where she, her brother and her family live.
Right now, under the prison debt law, the state charges people $249 per day, or $90,885 per year, to cover the cost of their incarceration.
The ACLU has pointed out that that is “more than what an in-state student would owe for 2.5 years’ attendance at UConn, including housing, food, and books.”
This debt “follows them for decades, decimating inheritances from deceased loved ones, proceeds from lawsuits (even for harms done to them by the State in prison), and, ultimately, anything a person leaves upon their death,” the organization said in a post on its website.
“Because of current and historic systemic racism, this prison debt disproportionately falls on Black and Latinx people in Connecticut, serving as another mechanism for preventing the accrual of intergenerational wealth among people of color,” it says.
Slossberg argued, with regard to the amount the state levies, that the state doesn’t “tell you what it is until afterward.”
“Isn’t it proportional to the offense” and the amount of time someone spends incarcerated, the judge asked.
In Llorens’ case, “You’re talking about an astounding amount” of time and money, in proportion to the offense, Slossberg argued. “It’s grossly excessive to the offense.”
Meyer asked the state’s lawyers whether the Attorney General’s office “has criteria that it applies to make sure it does not disproportionately” affect people “with debts … from so long ago,” after they’ve worked to restart their lives.
The state argued in a brief that “none of the named Plaintiffs has met their burden to allege facts that establish their standing and, for related reasons, Plaintiffs have failed to establish that their claims are ripe. In addition, even if Plaintiffs had standing at the outset of this litigation, post-filing amendments to the challenged laws have rendered Plaintiffs’ claims moot.”
Barrett, speaking after the hearing, disagreed.
“They contend that in effect it would never be possible for someone to file suit and challenge” the law, he said. “Their theory is, no one can ever file a lawsuit about it. They just have to pay.”
But he said “it’s very hard to argue that” a law that aims to charge formerly incarcerated people $90,000 a year is justified.
“They’re wrong on the fact and they’re wrong on the law, but that’s their argument,” he said. “It was heartening that the court seemed to really understand that this is an incredibly tough on people … It’s an incredibly inhumane set of laws. They should go away.”
Connecticut brings in between $4 million and $6 million annually using the prison debt statutes, the Department of Administrative Services, which handles debt collection, told Hearst Connecticut Media in April.
The DAS did not provide data on how many former inmates pay money on prison debt each year, but it did provide an overview of how the funds fit into its entire debt collection program.
“DAS collections collects just under $70 million dollars from roughly a couple thousand parties annually,” spokesperson Lora Rae Anderson said at the time. “Prison debt makes up for less than 10 percent of those dollars, at $4-6 million.”
mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
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