Messenger: She had a plan for life after prison. Then Missouri took her money.
CHILLICOTHE, Missouri — Kristen Milum got locked up when she was 28.
She was convicted of nonviolent burglary and theft charges in Clay County. She was sent away for 12 years. Now almost 40, she sees a light at the end of her tunnel. Milum has been preparing to leave prison. Her release date is two days before Christmas. She's making arrangements to live in a halfway house in Kansas City or St. Louis.
Over the years, friends and relatives have sent her money. She's also worked various jobs, making a pittance in wages from the Missouri Department of Corrections. In the past decade, she's saved $18,500 to help rebuild her life outside of prison and maybe re-connect with her five children, most of whom are now adults.
A month ago, Attorney General Andrew Bailey threw a wrench into those plans. Four months before Milum's release, Bailey filed a lawsuit against her under the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act (MIRA), which allows the state to seize an inmate's income, ostensibly to pay for part of their incarceration costs.
Milum received notice at the Chillicothe Correctional Institute that she no longer had access to her money. It's frozen, and she might lose all of it.
"I really thought I had everything taken care of, and now I'm lost trying to figure out how I'm going to survive," Milum said in an email. "I hate the fact that I'm in this position because I never want to become a statistic again. I have been a number and not a human being for so long that for a brief moment I felt like a human again, just knowing I had a real chance at being successful."
The cruelty of the MIRA law plays out in prison cells throughout Missouri, one incarcerated person at a time. People trying to follow all the rules to set up their return to society find out that an arm of the government is working against them. It's been that way in Missouri since lawmakers passed MIRA amid the "tough on crime" decade of the 1980s, as America's mass incarceration crisis was growing. Every state at one point passed a similar law, maybe because it sounded good. But it definitely was not because the pay-to-stay laws would put a dent in state corrections budgets.
In Missouri, the attorney general files dozens of such cases a year, seemingly targeting people like Milum, who have almost nothing to their name and nobody on the outside to help them. Many people, stuck in prison with no access to attorneys, never fight the lawsuits and simply lose their money. This year, a series of Missouri inmates, with the help of lawyers from St. Louis to Kansas City, are fighting to hold on to the assets and get the law declared as an unconstitutional taking of their property.
Jake Ringer hopes those lawyers are successful. A 52-year-old inmate at the Moberly Correctional Center, Ringer has spent much of his adult life in prison. He is currently serving time for a probation violation. During the time he was out, his father died. Just a few months before that, his mom died after a battle with cancer. His father left him a house. A $64,000 check from the sale of the house has been frozen by Bailey.
"I'm really tripping on these people trying to steal my money," Ringer told me in a phone call from prison. "That's my inheritance. It's everything I've got in the world."
Ringer is at least the fourth inmate this year that has received life insurance proceeds, or some other sort of payout after a parent died, and faced a lawsuit from Bailey. Even if Bailey were successful in every case, the money would amount to a tiny fraction of the Department of Corrections budget — and with some of the money going back to Bailey's office to pay for the lawyers to file new cases.
Meanwhile, people like Milum face the prospect of returning to society without a nest egg, no matter how small. It's a public policy in which cruelty seems to be the point. And taxpayers will pay the price if people like Milum or Ringer fall into old habits, or end up homeless, or need some sort of state aid.
"That money was my cushion and gave me peace of mind," Milum says. "That feeling has been ripped away from me like so many other things over this past 10 years. I thought I would have a head start on life and a fighting chance, but now (Bailey) took away all of my dreams and hopes of getting out and making it out there. I pray they don't do this to me. I have served my time and paid my dues. Now I have nothing, and I don't know what I'm going to do."
Metro columnist
