ABERDEEN, Wash. -- Anthony Powers recalls his arrival in the prison system 18 years ago. The prison provided him weekly with postage paid envelopes because he had no money.
“I was in that situation because I came from a poor family, when I first arrived I didn't have a job or anything," said Powers, who still has 77 years to serve on a murder conviction.
Now Powers has a prison job and can pay for his own postage. But he defends the program that provides five stamped envelopes a week to poor inmates so they can write family and friends.
"It's a necessity,” said Powers. “One of the things you want to avoid is people getting caught up in the culture of prison and have them focus on the outside."
"They're priceless. Those stamps represent the relationship with my family," said Andrew Raymond, a fellow inmate at Stafford Creek Correctional Center.
At the prison store, the state loans money to indigent inmates for certain items like soap and over the counter drugs. The inmates are supposed to pay the money back but a few hundred thousand dollars each year remains on the books.
The KING 5 Investigators found the bulk of that comes from loans to inmates for pre-stamped envelopes.
Half of the envelopes at prison stores are sold to indigent inmates.
From last year alone, $185,000 in postage debt remains unpaid by inmates at eight Washington prisons.
Prison officials say some inmates don’t have the family or the means to pay their postage.
“If we had more jobs it would be easier to say we won't pay for anything that's up to you," said Dawn Taylor, who runs programs for Stafford Creek Correctional Center. She said, like the outside world, there aren’t enough jobs to go around.
Prison officials point out the loans are made with money inmates and their families pay for collect phone calls. Still, there are those who think it could be better spent chipping away at dire budget problems.
A bill presented to this year's legislature would have put more limits on inmate loans. It failed, but Representative Kirk Pearson (R-Monroe) said he proposed the law after hearing complaints from corrections officer about unpaid loans.
The Department of Corrections knows this is a sensitive subject and is turning to some high tech ways to keep the costs down.
The agency installed email kiosks at some institutions. Inmates pay for each email so the system is self funded.
Inmate Raymond is constantly emailing and writing letters to his family.
"It allows me to restore the relationships I damaged when I was out there living recklessly," said Raymond, who still has several years to serve on a murder conviction.
Prison officials say this kind of contact with the world outside is vital to keeping the peace among inmates on the inside. While they do try to settle the debt before the inmate is released, they don’t try to collect the money when an offender is released.
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