Florida Pretrial Detainees Properly Charged “Subsistence Costs”

The Florida Court of Appeal for the Fourth District has upheld the constitutional application of a statue and a jail’s procedures allowing pretrial detainees to be charged “daily subsistence costs.”

Pretrial detainees Thomas Solomos and Lucas Pitters filed a suit against Sheriff Ken Jenne in the Broward County Circuit Court for the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, challenging the jail’s procedure and claiming that section 951.033, Florida Statutes (“Statute”) was vague and had been unconstitutionally applied. The circuit court granted Jenne’s motion for summary judgment and the plaintiffs appealed. On December 20, 2000, the Court of Appeal affirmed the circuit court’s judgment, holding that the statute had neither been vague nor unconstitutionally applied and that the jail’s procedure did not violate the statute.

The Broward County Jail implemented a procedure that charged detainees $10.00 once for uniforms and $2.00 daily for subsistence. These charges were assessed against a detainee’s bank account at the jail only if the account contained funds. In practice, if the account contained no funds, the detainee was deemed indigent and the detainee was not charged, with no negative balance accumulating.

Detainees were notified of the procedure through postings in the housing units and a handbook that each detainee was given. Detainees could seek administrative remedy for charges assessed against their accounts. The jail did not accept government or social security checks in order to prevent deductions of monies exempt under state or federal law.

The statute at issue on appeal provides in part that (1) a jail official “may direct a prisoner to pay for all or a fair portion of the daily subsistence costs,” (2) “shall determine the financial status of prisoners for the purpose of payment” and (3) “may seek payment…from” “[t]he prisoner’s cash account on deposit at the facility.” The statute also states that “[consideration shall be given to the prisoner’s ability to pay.”

After the circuit court had granted summary judgment in Sheriff Jenne’s favor, upholding the jail’s procedure and the statute’s constitutional application, the plaintiffs argued on appeal that the notice given that charges would be assessed and the failure to provide a hearing prior to the assessment of the charges were insufficient to satisfy due process. The plaintiffs further pointed out that the handbooks’s designation of the $10.00 fee being used for a “processing fee” was improper under the statute. They also argued that the statute was vague and gave the sheriff unrestricted discretion.

The court of appeal rejected each of the plaintiffs’ arguments, finding that due process had been satisfied as the handbook and postings in the housing units sufficiently informed detainees of subsistence charges and as procedures were available to make complaints against the assessment of these charges. As for the jails’s use of the terminology, “uniform fee” or “processing fee,” the court stated that either one fit the intent of the statute.

Additionally, the court of appeal held that the statute was not “overly vague” by not defining indigence where the jail’s use of the existence of funds in a detainee’s account accurately construed “ability to pay” under the statute. Also, the statute “allows the sheriff to enforce the statute to its fullest or accept less from inmates.” This did not give the sheriff “unfettered discretion.”

See: Solomos v. Jenne, 776 So.2d 953 (Fla. 4^th DCA 2000)

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