Who Pays When Missouri Seizes Prisoners’ Money? Taxpayers

“I personally do not disagree with being responsible for costs that would provide relief to innocent taxpayers,” Brownfield emailed me this week from the Jefferson City Correctional Center.

The 68-year-old is currently serving a sentence for burglary and longtime fugitive from justice. If he gets parole — he’s set to be released next year — he’ll have to pay various supervised costs. Such laws are made with “righteous intent,” Brownfield believes. He has no problem with that.

But the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act? That’s another story.

The law allows the Missouri Attorney General to sue prisoners and seize their property, using the money to cover the cost of their incarceration. In most cases, the lawsuits are filed after a prisoner makes a small profit, such as when a family member dies. Most defendants do not have attorneys and never go to court. Some try to fight the seizure from their prison cells. The state receives a tip compared to the Department of Corrections’ total budget.

Last year, for example, the budget was nearly $187 million. Revenue from the prison-related lawsuits filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was $450,000. That’s no measurable relief for taxpayers. But it’s a significant cost to prisoners, who in some cases lose 90 percent of the income they need to reintegrate into society.

Who pays the costs when prisoners are released from prison and need extra help? Taxpayers.

“In my case, MIRA does not provide the intended relief to taxpayers,” Brownfield wrote to me, “but will ultimately be a way to tax them twice, because I now need help that I would not otherwise have needed.”

On Tuesday, Brownfield’s attorney, Irene Karns of Columbia, was in court to make the same argument.

“He wants to buy a pickup truck,” Karns told Cole County Superior Court Judge Chris Limbaugh, who handles most MIRA cases.

Brownfield has training in welding and plans to get a job in that field when he gets out of prison. “A man can’t work without a good vehicle,” Karns said.

Bailey sued Brownfield last year, seeking to seize $35,000 Brownfield received two years ago in a federal lawsuit settlement with Corizon Health, Inc. The settlement stems from an injury Brownfield suffered while a prison inmate in Kansas. He was trying to fix a broken ice machine at a job he had gotten in prison. Two of his fingers were nearly severed. After he was taken to the hospital, a doctor suggested immediate surgery. The prison said no, according to court records. The hospital sewed his fingers back together and prescribed painkillers.

According to the lawsuit, the prison failed to give him painkillers and failed to properly care for his fingers. They are still attached, but not very functional. Prison health care is notoriously poor, and Brownfield’s settlement was not unusual.

Here’s the absurd kicker: If Brownfield had been injured in a Missouri prison, Bailey wouldn’t have been able to touch the settlement. That’s because Missouri courts have said it would be unfair for the state to seize money obtained by an inmate in a lawsuit against the state and punish the inmate for defending his civil rights. Karns asks Limbaugh to apply the same logic to Brownfield’s settlement.

She uses the same argument in the case of Ronnie Pope. The St. Louis man was attacked by a security guard at the City Justice Center while he was awaiting trial for theft. After I wrote about Bailey trying to seize Pope’s $12,000 settlement, Karns, a 75-year-old retired public defender who now does mostly pro bono legal work, called Pope. She now represents him.

“Even modest rewards, as in Mr. Pope’s case, have great meaning for the inmate,” she wrote in a legal document in the case. “Equally important, the rewards demonstrate to society that the justice system is willing to remedy violations of the constitutional rights of the powerless.”

There is nothing in the MIRA Act that has anything to do with public safety. Limbaugh’s decisions in the cases will not add or subtract a single day from the defendants’ sentences. None of the money will go to victims of crime. It is simply a matter of the Attorney General seizing money because he can.

Karns is now one of a number of Missouri attorneys — Bevis Schock of Clayton and Michael Shipley of Kansas City are two others — challenging the constitutionality of a 1988 law that came as mass incarceration soars across the country. Lawmakers at the time were willing to throw people in prison and throw away the key, figuratively speaking, but were less willing to fund a major expansion of state prison budgets. So they passed a law that required inmates to pay some of their own costs.

“The money in these cases means nothing to the state,” Karns says.

But those dollars mean everything to prisoners who need apartments, transportation, food and clothing when they get out of prison and go home to St. Louis or other communities to rebuild their lives. Brownfield and Pope are Karns’ first MIRA cases, and she hopes her advocacy will make a difference.

“It’s a privilege as a lawyer to be able to do something morally right that’s also legally right,” she says. “Those two things don’t often come together.”