{"id":82,"date":"2018-12-04T13:08:32","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T19:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/?p=82"},"modified":"2019-09-20T17:01:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-20T22:01:50","slug":"probation-costs-too-much-so-he-stayed-in-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/2018\/12\/04\/probation-costs-too-much-so-he-stayed-in-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Probation Costs Too Much, So He Chose To Go Back To Jail"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of people\u00a0see prison as\u00a0the last resort, the ultimate thing to avoid. For some\u00a0folks on the financial edge, spending time behind bars is a choice \u2014 something they opt into when probation gets too expensive. That’s the decision Chainnaron Soeurn made after months of\u00a0struggling\u00a0with the costs of probation, which can reach thousands of dollars a year. He traded his freedom for the promise of a clean slate.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00bb Explore the One Crisis Away: The Price of Prison series<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Chainnaron Soeurn sits down behind a locked mesh door at Hutchins State Jail, 15 miles southeast of downtown Dallas. A guard is never more than a couple feet away.<\/p>\n

Soeurn gets along with people well inside the jail. He passes the time by playing chess.<\/p>\n

“Most of your friends that say they’re your friends, when you’re locked up like this, nowhere to be found. No letter, no money for the commissary or nothing,” he says. “But when you’re out there, ‘Hey what’s up?’ Shake your hand. ‘Where you been? How you been?’ Oh, now<\/em> you want to be my friend.”<\/p>\n

Soeurn says he misses his girlfriend and\u00a0his two boys, 3-year-old Legend and 2-year-old Liam. He had a big family growing up: six brothers and three sisters.\u00a0His parents were Cambodian refugees.<\/p>\n

“My dad, he used to walk around with my mom and pick up cans and sell cans, and then he found a job as a mechanic and he went from there,” Soeurn recalls. “Grew up in the ghetto but, you know, we’d try and make life the way it was \u2014 easy and not too hard, day by day.”<\/p>\n

The East Dallas neighborhood where Soeurn\u00a0grew up was rough. Then, one day, when he was a teenager, he was arrested for aggravated robbery\u00a0at a corner store a few blocks from\u00a0home.<\/p>\n

“Ended up doing something that I wasn’t supposed to do,” he says. “I got locked up and I was like around 14, going on 15. Didn’t come out until I was 18.”<\/p>\n

\"Chainnaron<\/p>\n

Chainnaron Soeurn at Hutchins State Jail on Aug. 15, 2018. Photo: Thorne Anderson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

‘Just lock me up’<\/h5>\n

 
\nAfter\u00a0time\u00a0in juvenile detention, Soeurn\u00a0went years without an arrest. He met his girlfriend, had his two\u00a0kids and landed a job as a supervisor of a\u00a0shipping company.<\/p>\n

Then he got nailed for possession of\u00a0methamphetamine in 2016. He struggled to keep up with the terms of his probation.<\/p>\n

“We’ve got to pay for court costs, restitution fees, probation every month, drug tests, class fees,” he says. “It’s around $2,200 to $2,600 yearly. And depending on how long you signed for \u2014 I signed for three years \u2014 that’s $6,600 I could have put towards my kids and my girl.”<\/p>\n

Plus, there’s the time probation takes: appointments for community service, drug testing, check-ins with the probation officer. He has to pay for each one, all while trying to hold down a job.<\/p>\n

“The probation expects us to keep a job, but when we have a job, we lose a job, because we had to do what they tell us to do,” Soeurn says. “And if we don’t do what they tell us to do, we end up back in jail.”<\/p>\n

“Probation is basically signing up for failure.”<\/p>\n
Chainnaron Soeurn<\/div>\n
<\/i>Tweet Chainnaron's story<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Soeurn ended up in and out of jail a few times while on probation, dinged for things like missed appointments, or driving without a valid license.<\/p>\n

So he made a decision.<\/p>\n

“I was like, ‘You know what? Just lock me up, let me do my time, get back out to my family,'” he says.<\/p>\n

He chose<\/em> jail time over probation, because he couldn’t afford the terms or the time it took to keep them up.<\/p>\n

Banking on a fresh start<\/h5>\n

 
\nJulie Siddique\u00a0teaches criminal justice at the University of North Texas at Dallas. She says many men and women make the same\u00a0choice.<\/p>\n

“The requirements and the expectations of probation can be extremely burdensome for some individuals,” Siddique says. “And so they may choose not to go for probation and prefer to carry out a sentence instead.”<\/p>\n

Depending on the offense and the jurisdiction, probation costs add up.<\/p>\n

“Typically, at least maybe $25 a month to as high as $200, $250 a month,” she says.<\/p>\n

\"Probationers<\/a><\/p>\n

Probationers can expect to have to comply with this basic list of requirements. For the monthly payment, a judge decides how much an individual probationer’s fees will be. (Source: Dallas County Community Supervision and Corrections)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

That means an ex-offender could have to pay $3,000 a year \u2014 for probation.<\/p>\n

Another complication? Just getting around.<\/p>\n

“Relying on public transportation, which isn’t always reliable, can lead to missed appointments and also the possibility of violating the conditions of probation, which then can lead to additional time on probation or even revocation of the probation,” Siddique says.<\/p>\n

An ex-offender\u00a0may have to sign on for more probation\u00a0time, and then\u00a0end up back in jail\u00a0anyway.<\/p>\n

That’s\u00a0what Chainnaron Soeurn\u00a0saw coming.<\/p>\n

“So far, I’ve met about eight, nine people who did the same thing I did because, you know, it’s better doing the time than signing up for something that could put you back in jail, throwing you out there for failure again,” he says. “Because probation is basically signing up for failure.”<\/p>\n

That’s why he walked into Hutchins State Jail in May. To him though, it’s not a dead end \u2014 it’s the key to a new beginning.<\/p>\n

“I’m getting out there, slate clean, with nothing to worry about,” he says. “It’s basically like a fresh start.”<\/p>\n

He will have a felony\u00a0record, which does make it harder to find work and rent an apartment. But he won’t have to pull away from\u00a0his job\u00a0every week to make probation classes.<\/p>\n

And he won’t\u00a0be paying a\u00a0couple hundred dollars into the system each month for probation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some\u00a0folks on the financial edge, spending time behind bars is a choice \u2014 something they opt into when probation gets too expensive. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":31,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-one-crisis-away-price-of-prison","post_format-post-format-audio","byline-courtney-collins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/price-of-prison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}