Storage fee emptying jail inmates’ pockets again
People arrested by the San Antonio Police Department and booked into jail should not have to pay to retrieve their personal property after their release.
Prisoners booked into the new county jail can surrender only one credit card, one form of ID, a cellphone, keys and up to $1,000 in cash into the property room because it is not big enough to accommodate all the personal property detainees have on them at the time of arrest. Anything else in their possession — sleeping bags, wallets, jewelry — must go to the city property room, and 11 years ago City Council quietly imposed a $25 fee for prisoners to get their property back.
This is absurd. That charge needs to be revisited. It is a burden for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder who end up in custody. A $25 fee may not seem like much to some, but consider that many arrestees are indigent and require court-appointed attorneys.
“You’re preying on poor people’s lives,” Laquita Garcia, a San Antonio-based bail reform advocate with the Texas Organizing Project, told the Express-news.
“This could involve people not being able to access their IDS, Social Security cards, birth certificates, medicine, car keys. They may not be able to pay their rent. They may lose their jobs and ultimately come right back to jail. It’s debtors prison again,” Garcia said.
No other major Texas municipality charges the people they arrest to get their property back. We can understand charging inmates for commissary items while in jail. But a service fee for retrieving their personal property after their release is unjustifiable. Detainees have no options but to surrender their personal property when arrested. An arrest does not make a person guilty. All people deserve the presumption of innocence. Many charges get dismissed, or the defendants are found not guilty. Court fees are applicable — although these, too, can be problematic for people with lower incomes — once a case has made it through system and there has been a conviction. In 2019, the property fees generated $198,410 from the nearly 31,000 items surrendered at booking, according to a Police Department spokesman.
The fee is waived if prisoners can prove they are indigent, but that policy is not widely known and some prisoners tell the Express-news the policy is inconsistently applied.
The county also bears some responsibility in all this.
The new county jail’s property room is about
the size of the city’s, according to Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar.
This reflects poor design of the county’s Justice Intake and Assessment Annex. The sheriff needs to expand storage to allow prisoners to surrender all their personal property in one place. Storing items belonging to inmates at two different locations is untenable.
The county holds the property of inmates free of charge, but they then need to make an appointment to retrieve their belongings at the city property room, near Frio City Road and U.S. 90. What does that do to the homeless left without their bedroll on a cold winter night? Detainees should not have to pay because of design flaws in the county’s new lockup, and they definitely should not have to pay a storage fee to the city for that shortcoming.