The original goal of this research was to examine parole systems in the United States and in other countries which require convicted persons to pay for the privilege of parole. The intended purpose of this examination was to provide a basis for a study of the parole system in Massachusetts. Salient facts discovered through a sober consideration of this concept, supplemented by a preliminary search of the literature, how ever, dictated a modification of the original research goal.
To require a convicted person to pay for the privilege of not being incarcerated would be similar in concept to the debtors' prisons of an age past. Under such a system, those persons with sufficient financial resources would be able to buy their way out of prison, while the economically unfortunate would be required to suffer confinement for the period judici ally designated. Such a system would be patently unconstitu tional in the United States (Ring, 1989), and, thus, no juris diction in this country operates a parole system on such a conceptual and philosophical basis as paying for the privilege of parole (Gary and Olson, 1989). As such a system would be patently unconstitutional in the United States, and as there is little likelihood that a constitutional amendment could be ratified to legalize a debtors' prison like system of parole in
1 2this country (Ring, 1989), it would have been pointless to search for, and, if found, review literature relevant to sys tems in other countries where convicted persons are permitted to pay for the privilege of parole. Thus, this aspect of the original research goal for this examination was dropped.
Several states in the United States do, however, operate systems wherein convicted persons are required to pay a part of the costs associated with the administration of their paroles or probations (Allen, Eskridge, Latessa, and Vito, 1985). The potential for such systems to be abused, and to become defact...