Wisconsin GOP lawmakers propose forcing prisoners to use stimulus to pay restitution for crimes

It is unclear if the bill has a serious chance at passing. While Republicans hold a comfortable majority in both chambers of Wisconsin’s legislature, Gov. Tony Evers (D) has not indicated any public support for such a proposal.

But it nonetheless marks the latest entry in an unraveling debate over whether, and how, people in prison should be able to receive stimulus payments — a debate that Republicans did not take public until President Biden was in the White House.

While Bradley first took office in January, the bill’s co-sponsor, State Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R), has served in Madison since 2013. He and his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post late on Monday.

When Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (Cares) Act last spring, it did not explicitly include or exclude incarcerated people, as with other groups like undocumented immigrants.

The Internal Revenue Service initially said that inmates, like most other Americans, could receive the $1,200 stimulus checks — and they did. The agency sent a total of about $100 million in economic impact payments to people in correctional facilities, The Post’s Michelle Singletary reported, through nearly 85,000 economic impact payments.

In May, however, the IRS reversed its guidance, instructing jails and prisons to seize any forthcoming payments. Incarcerated people and their families who had already received the relief money were told they would need to return it.

Instead, many joined a class-action suit in California, where a federal judge twice sided with their case and then ordered prisons and jails to give their inmates more time and resources to receive their stimulus payments.

When the second ruling came down in October, Kelly Dermody, one of the lawyers representing plaintiffs and class-action members, said she hoped the legal fight would be “the last of it.”

The Trump administration has “already wasted a lot of taxpayer money chasing after checks that were previously properly issued, misleading correctional authorities about eligibility, and filing brief after brief in court trying to stop our fellow Americans from getting stimulus money,” Dermody told The Post in October.

But as Congress hashed out the details of a third stimulus package — this time, working with a Democrat in the White House — it would hardly be the end of a debate over whether incarcerated individuals should qualify for a payment.

Two amendments, including one proposed by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), would have effectively denied the $1,400 checks to individuals in prison.

But some advocates have pushed back on these and similar attempts. Stephen Raher, a volunteer attorney at the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts think tank, noted that the coronavirus pandemic has ramped up costs for incarcerated individuals. Besides rising prices for food and hygiene items at commissaries, many facilities that had barred in-person visits began to charge for phone and video calls.

If stimulus payments did not help people pay for these services in prison or jail, he wrote in a December blog post, they would allow these individuals to start saving up for any expenses once they are released from custody.

When neither amendment was adopted earlier this year, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) focused on the benefits for some of the country’s most notorious criminals. Cotton took to Twitter to point out that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, could also be receiving $1,400 stimulus payments.

“Congress (or at least Republicans) did not intend to send prisoners serving life sentences stimulus checks as part of CARES,” Cotton tweeted on March 8.

As The Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote, however, there is no guarantee that someone like Roof would in fact receive payments: While he or any other prisoner could file a form to receive their payment, the prepaid debit cards being sent out by the IRS to many individuals like him cannot be used in jail.

The fact that such debit cards are often intercepted by prison authorities — or are otherwise difficult to access — ultimately points to some of the challenges that may arise to carry out a bill like the one introduced in the Wisconsin legislature.