Florida’s “Pay to Stay” Law: A Second Sentence for Former Prisoners
A month before Florida lawmakers were set to end their most recent session on May 2, 2025, there was no effort to revive House Bill (HB) 1111, or its companion Senate Bill (SB) 1310—twin measures that would amend the state’s “pay to stay” law to allow judges to consider a prisoner’s ability to pay before imposing fees for the cost of their incarceration.
F.R.S. ch. 951.033 authorizes the state to charge prisoners up to $50 per day for those costs, but the state is not an outlier; the nonprofit Brennan Center counted 42 others in 2014, though Illinois and New Hampshire repealed their statutes in 2019, and Missouri followed suit in March 2025, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, May 2025, p.45.]
Adding to frustration in Florida is uneven application of the law from county to county. Yet ignorance persists among lawmakers like former state Sen. Jeff Brandes (R-Pinellas County), who admitted: “Listen, I was on the Criminal Justice Committee for years, chaired the Criminal Justice Appropriations Committee, I did not know this was the law.”
Even worse: The state collected just $80,000 of the debt over a three-year period between mid-2021 and mid-2024—an amount easily missed in the $5.991 billion annual budget of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
“It doesn’t work,” declared Fifth Judicial District Public Defender Michael Graves. Rather than leaving custody saddled with incarceration debt, he wants a released prisoner “to buy property. I want that person to pay property taxes and ad valorem taxes and help pay for the schools and the roads.”
But that’s hard for people like Shelby Hoffman, who served 10 months of a seven-year sentence and now faces a $127,750 debt for a cell that she did not occupy the other six years and two months. She learned of the financial burden only when applying for an exemption from felon disqualification to work in her dream job as a case manager.
“To my knowledge,” she said, “I had paid everything off, completed every term that was on that paper, I petitioned the courts to get off of probation, [the judge] clapped for me and said you out of anybody deserve this.”
Without the new law, Hoffman’s attorney failed to modify her bill for incarceration to cover the ten months that she actually spent in custody in a state Department of Children and Families youth bootcamp. The judge denying the motion cited state law that says a court may not modify a sentence 60 days after it was imposed.
Former judge Lisa Foster, Co-Executive Director of the nonprofit Fines & Fees Justice Center, called the law’s disregard for an individual’s ability to pay unconstitutional. For the poor, who make up the vast majority of those entangled in the criminal justice system, incarceration debt functions as a “life sentence,” she said, hindering employment opportunities, housing access and overall well-being.
Source: WFTS Tampa
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