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A Rationale for Eliminating the Intervention Fee
by Sr. Mary Ann McGivern
In the 2005 Omnibus Crime Bill, the Missouri State Legislature began allowing the Board of Probation and Parole to collect up to $60 a month from probationers and parolees. The money is to be used for community programs to assist these men and women in re-entering society. Examples include paying for mental health beds, substance abuse programs, medications for chronic illness, and a place to stay during the first months after release.
In April 2006, the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole imposed the fee, which it set at $30 a month. A collection agency collects it for 10 percent of the income — close to $1.5 million a month — from 51,700 probationers and 17,000 parolees. Now, about a third of these men and women are more than three months in arrears. See http://www.doc.mo.gov/division/prob/pdf/InterventionFeeFAQ.pdf
Project COPE seeks out participants who earnestly want to build new lives. They’ve been in prison a long time and most of their family relationships have deteriorated; they don’t have job skills or much experience in the work place. Most have been convicted of violent crimes. Every day, they are out looking for work, but when they find a job it often pays minimum wage, $7.05 an hour, which yields take-home pay of only $600 a month.
Rent, food, a $60 bus pass, utilities — the money is quickly gone. And many people have child support to pay. No wonder thousands of ex-offenders are behind in their payments. A real question is whether they are on their way to becoming offenders again because they need to pay that fee.
Here are a few Project COPE experiences: on the night shift, John does welding at minimum wage; by day, he goes to Community College. He has finished two years, but he is tired all the time. Stacy works at Popeye’s. She never gets the full 40 hours a week, and the manager keeps changing her shift, so she has not been able to start school. Torey and Jess are married with a child and no money — and they both have that $30-a-month fee to pay. Mickey gave up on renewing her blood pressure medication because she didn’t have the money. She said, “Why do they start you on these expensive medications in prison when you can’t afford them once you’re out?”
In 2007, the Board of Probation and Parole spent almost $6 million dollars of intervention fee money. Most of it replaced fees of $10 a day that had been charged to 2,000 probationers and parolees who were being electronically monitored or who had beds at the Kansas City or St. Louis Release Centers. About $12 million was appropriated for 2008, allowing for some substance abuse treatment, mental health beds, and pilot programs to pay for medications and re-entry housing for women.
But the 2009 budget appropriated $12 million on a new computer system for the Department of Corrections, in apparent violation of the law requiring that the intervention fee money be spent on community programs to assist prisoners' re-entry into society.
The intervention fee money goes into the Inmate Revolving Fund. It is not part of general revenue and should not be used for anything but re-entry services. The men and women who pay that $30 a month are terrified of being sent back to prison. They do without shoes and a telephone; they don’t pay utilities; they walk instead of buying a bus pass; and they go hungry. They also go without the community programs that would help them recover from addiction and maintain their mental and physical health.
If this money is not used to serve them, they are the victims of a crime, too.
