Kensley Hawkins: Asked to Pay for Incarceration With Jailhouse Earnings

Kensley Hawkins (pictured) was sent to prison in 1980 for the murder of one man and the attempted murder of two police officers in Chicago. He had an 8-year-old daughter and was going to be in prison for a very long time.

During his time in prison, Kensley earned $75 per month building furniture in Joliet, Ill. Somehow, he was able to save $11,000 during his stay in the penitentiary as a small tribute to his daughter, who is now nearly 4 years old. But the state of Illinois is not satisfied and has asked that Kensley be required to pay for the costs of his incarceration.

 

The state is arguing that Mr. Hawkins owes them $455,203.14 for the cost of keeping him in prison. The case has now reached the Illinois Supreme Court.

"The reason you want Mr. Hawkins to keep his money is because he's gonna get out of prison some day, and when he gets out of prison, we want him to have saved his money so that he can take care of himself; you don't want the public to have to pay for him," Hawkins' attorney, Ben Weinberg, told Fox Chicago.

The state of Illinois typically pursues those with more than $10,000 in assets, and by saving his money, Hensley is now eligible to have it all taken away. The Department of Corrections is allowed to extract three percent of the wages that inmates earn during their time in prison, even though many of them earn roughly a day's pay for every month that they work.

In her very telling book, 'The New Jim Crow,' Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander goes into detail about how the racism of the old South has been replaced by a system in which those who've been convicted of crimes are allowed to be treated as less than human.

The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, supposedly abolishing slavery, actually says that slavery is still legal for those who've been convicted of a crime. This has provided a convenient loophole that allows the state to extract either free or shockingly cheap labor out of a segment of the population, with most of the individuals being African American.

To see the Kensley Hawkins situation as a casual outside observer, the idea that a man has been forced to work for $75 dollars per month already argues that the state owes him hundreds of thousands of dollars for paying him a salary that is even below the wages paid to illegal immigrants (which are nearly as horrible).

The half-million or more in wages and interest that have been extracted from Mr. Hawkins is more than enough to cover the cost of his incarceration. To charge him again would be adding a punishment on top of a punishment.

We've also got to ask ourselves just how productive a justice system can be when it is designed in such a way that our fellow Americans are given a life debt that they simply cannot pay. Rather than making the world safer, the criminal justice system has been effectively designed to create more criminals.

The racial implications are written all over the walls, since African Americans are the ones most likely to fill up the penitentiaries, with many of them being incarcerated because they could not afford an adequate legal defense.

This problem is especially pervasive in the state of Illinois, where one story after another has come out about police torturing inmates into a confession or putting men on death row who never killed anyone.

Rather than being rehabilitated in any way, many of these men and women find themselves in the streets without the right to vote, the ability to work or the chance to obtain an education. So, we effectively give the inmate and his/her family no way to properly re-integrate into society, other than wishful thinking.

The system is designed for (mostly black) families to fail and to maintain a permanent underclass in America.

Mr. Hawkins is not eligible for parole until the year 2028, so his rehabilitation is the last concern of the state of Illinois. What this case tells us, though, is this society is one where we've decided that anyone given the label of "criminal" should have all of his/her human rights stripped to the core.

That is a dangerous and slippery slope, for the way we treat our inmates is a reflection of our values as a society. Kensley Hawkins should be allowed to keep his money and at least some of his integrity, for the state has been compensated many times over already.