The United States makes it their point, to lock up a high percentage of those that have been convicted inside their incarceration facilities, and has the audacity to further believe that they have the Constitutional right to charge convicts money for all sorts of things, such as, incredibly under certain circumstances, for the cost of their daily incarceration accrued over their time imprisoned, as well as for as reported by brennancenter.org, for "…case filing, felony surcharges, electronic monitoring, drug testing, and sex offender registration," amongst other various things. To believe, that this is fair to the person so incarcerated, is clearly misguided, since the person serving the time does not have the option of opting-out from these unjust fees.
When the justice arm of the government, rightly or wrongly, takes away the freedom of a given individual, then it should not have the indecency to then charge them for costs or alleged costs of their incarceration or parts of their incarceration. If, on the other hand, the justice choice of a particular case, allows the option for those convicted of certain crimes, to decide as to whether their preference would be to do the time and not be charged additional incarceration fees, or to sign up to pay these fees in order to remain free, that would be an acceptable form of justice, but that is seldom the case.
The fact that that it costs real money to incarcerate individuals is something that everybody is already quite aware of. If, that society does not wish to expend unwarranted monies on the incarceration industrial complex, it should not have to. To, on the other hand, take those that are typically without money, without their freedom, and without good resources and then expect them to somehow be able to successfully fight the system that has effectively used the people's resources to oppress them, and thereby somehow to overcome these repressing fees, as well, is never going to happen.
The easiest people in the world to deal with in a controlling, overbearing and cruel manner are those that have had their freedom curtailed, who are often ill educated, and are fundamentally poor in virtually every aspect of life. To somehow believe that burdening these people with monetary fines, over and above everything else that they have to deal with, is wrong. Again, it must be said, incarceration for anyone is punishment enough, and anything in addition to that, is unacceptable.
The rub of the situation really comes down to the salient fact, that the costs of incarcerating all the people that America so incarcerates, is prohibitively expensive and legislators are often therefore reluctant to implement additional taxes upon the people to pay for all that incarceration. So then, instead we have the current state of affairs, which puts an unfair burden of incarceration upon those that have little or no means to pay for such.
What America really needs to address, is to understand that in order to correct systemic problems, such as the high amount of people incarcerated and the cost thereof, necessitates fundamental changes that thereupon will provide real opportunity and fairness to those that have been forever denied such. The wrong answer is to lock up more and more people, seeing them in essence as a collective lost cause, when in fact, what has really occurred, is the non-recognition that a significant amount of these people, have never been given a fair chance to begin with.