Author: Karl Smallwood / Source: Today I Found Out
Jill T. asks – Would you be able to explain what happens to peoples money and property if they end up going to jail forever?
Prison, by design, is a place where a number of your rights are either stripped away or are severely limited in some manner.
The right most pertinent to the topic of conversation today is the ability to freely access your bank account and/or manage any money or assets you may have.First though we should probably mention the distinction between jail and prison as the terms are often, erroneously, used interchangeably. In a nutshell, jails generally serve to hold individuals who are awaiting trial and, in the U.S. are typically run by county offices, whereas prisons hold those who’ve been sentenced and usually run by Prisons and Corrections offices in each state. As with all things in life, there are exceptions here and individuals sentenced to shorter sentences (usually less than a year) can be incarcerated in jails.
Moving on, in the United States, with the exception of a few specific types of crime we’ll discuss in more detail in a moment, upon being sentenced, absolutely nothing whatsoever will happen to your money, property and assets. In fact, an often unforeseen downside of being arrested and sent to prison is that you’re still on the hook for all of the financial obligations you committed to prior to being arrested and sentenced including rent, bills and of course debts. But, of course, at this point, you’re likely to have lost any way to make any significant amount of money to pay said bills.
So, if you head to prison with a phone contract or even something like a Netflix subscription, that money will continue be vacuumed out of your account each and every month. And due to the fact that you’re, well, in prison, cancelling or freezing these contracts is made exponentially more difficult, and from a practical standpoint resolving this sort of thing can be impossible for some inmates.
As a direct result of these problems, it’s not unlikely to leave prison only to be immediately hounded by debt collectors and the like. Along with now having the label of convicted criminal, this generally doesn’t set up a person recently freed from prison to easily be able to become a productive member of society.
For this reason and others, many lawyers strongly advise getting your financial life, including settling any debts and getting rid of any bills you can, in order before any kind of potential prison sentence to avoid an unnecessary loss of funds or leaving prison in a worse financial situation than when you entered it, which is extremely common.
This can be difficult, however, for those suddenly arrested and unable to post bail in order to potentially have an interim period between jail and prison to get everything in order.
Then again, depending on the amount of time you’re sentenced to serve, having something like a Netflix account or similar subscription that takes a very small amount of money from your account each month, can actually be a good idea for some inmates.
The reason being that it is the policy of most banks to freeze accounts if no activity is recorded on it for a set amount of time. (The amount varies from bank to bank, but around 6-12 months of inactivity seems to be a good ballpark figure for when this generally occurs according to our research).
Further, if your account has been frozen for more than 15 years, at least in the UK, the government is allowed to take any money in such an account and distribute it to worthy causes, though technically you’re still supposed to be able to recover the money even then, if you happen to be able to track it down after all that time.
On that note, if your account is frozen, a bank should have no problem unfreezing it, provided you can jump through the required hoops. The problem being that unfreezing an account from within prison is, from a practical standpoint, sometimes an effort in futility, with the best case scenario being that you’ll be able to get the account unfrozen after many months of effort and help from someone on the outside. Thus, lawyers generally advise making nominal payments into or from a given account while in prison to avoid this happening.
A problem here, of course, is that while in prison, in many regions of the world, you are forbidden, or severely restricted, to any direct access to any bank accounts you have.
This might all have you wondering how do you make any payments or deposits from prison? Well, in the UK prisoners are allowed to make limited banking transactions “of a personal nature” provided they are to either –
For example, a British prisoner can issue checks, pay debts and even authorise the sale of property and assets, within reason or run a (legitimate) business in a limited capacity. However, there are often severe restrictions to access to telephone and internet banking, if access if given at all, meaning for most inmates any banking has to be done by mail…
It should also be noted here that access to mail and what correspondence are allowed in and out for a given inmate can often be severely restricted as well.
In addition, most prisoners on both sides of the pond usually have access to special prison accounts usable within prison. This account can use to buy things from the commissary like toiletries or even personal items like TVs or radios at the discretion of prison officials. In fact, if you ever find yourself in prison and wish to watch a TodayIFoundOut video, you can actually do so in the United States, though at a remarkably absorbent price per video that we have nothing to do with- if it were up to us,…
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