…The cost of visiting a spouse in prison (both in lost time and expenses), inflated commissary bills, prohibitively expensive phone bills, the cost of lost time due to traveling, court dates, and meetings, and legal fees make it impossible…
One in four Black children born in the era of mass incarceration will have a parent who is incarcerated, which will limit that parent’s earning by an average of 40% over their lifetime. The cycle of incarceration is expensive at every single step — from the cost of arrests, legal fees, and fines, parole, and lost jobs and hours on the clock, evictions, and so much more — and effectively traps people in a feedback loop of poverty that’s nearly impossible to break.
This, I think, is truly at the heart of the advice we tend to offer poor people: It implicitly says that we believe that they should be willing and able to exchange their own time on earth, comfort, happiness, and even physical health and safety just to scrape by.