SC prison inmates eligible to get $1,200 COVID-19 checks, just like other Americans

Thousands of South Carolina’s 16,000-plus inmates in prisons around the state are eligible for $1,200 COVID-19 relief checks from the IRS under the Coronavirus, Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, due to a federal court ruling in California.

Although that ruling by a California federal judge has been appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the court ruling — which allows prisoners across the nation to apply for the money — continues in effect.

Although the S.C. Department of Corrections originally was unsure about how to proceed, the department has now posted information brochures in its 21 state prison facilities giving information about how to go about applying to the IRS for the CARES Act money.

“When the IRS changed its direction to allow incarcerated people to file for stimulus relief while this case is on appeal, we distributed forms for them to do so,” SCDC Director Bryan Stirling said.

“However, we will be making legal deductions for pending debts as the law allows.” Such debts would vary from prisoner to prisoner.

Last March, as the nationwide economic havoc posed by the pandemic took effect, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CARES Act, a $2 trillion economic relief package for American workers and businesses. The money helped allow suddenly jobless workers to keep paying bills and buy food and helped keep companies bereft of customers in business.

The CARES Act did not specify that inmates in state and federal prisons could get money. In early May, the IRS made a determination that it would not issue checks — called Economic Impact Payments, or EIP for short — to inmates and refused to issue the checks, which were dubbed Economic Impact Payments, or EIP, for short.

On Aug. 1 in California, lawyers from the Oakland-based Equal Justice Society, a non-profit civil rights group, and a San Francisco law firm who represented two California inmates, one current and one former, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the IRS, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other federal defendants.

The lawsuit asserted that the CARES Act was intended to benefit all Americans, including current California state inmate Colin Scholl, who had a filed a 2019 tax return, and former inmate Lisa Strawn, who was released in July but had not filed a 2019 tax return.

Both Scholl and Strawn are eligible to receive a CARES Act payment, the lawsuit alleged. Scholl had been turned down by the IRS, and Strawn was deterred from requesting a CARES Act check because she was aware of the IRS policy of denying payments to inmates or ex-inmates, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, Scholl intended to use the money to help him take rehabilitation programs to transition to civilian life after his expected release in 2021. Strawn said she would use the money for “food, transportation, housing and other necessities in her transition from prison to the San Francisco community” where she lived.

The lawsuit, which sought class action status, alleged that the inmates clearly were eligible under the CARES Act’s broad definition of people who could get the EIP payments.

On Sept. 24, U.S. District Judge Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed with the inmates and issued an order certifying a nationwide class of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons. She also ordered the IRS and the U.S. Treasury to stop denying CARES Act funds to inmates. That order is now under appeal.

In her ruling, Hamilton also ordered federal officials to notify the nation’s correctional facilities that inmates were now eligible for EIP payments and to post information notifying the inmates of how to go about applying for the money.

A study by the IRS had determined that at least 80,000 inmates across the country were eligible for the payments, according to the Equal Justice Society.

Various civil rights groups, including those that advocate on behalf of low-income, people of color and incarcerated persons — which one brief called “especially financially vulnerable class in American society” — also filed friend of the court briefs supporting the California inmates.

The money will come in handy for the S.C. inmates, said Shirene Hansotia, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, a group that has advocated for prisoner rights in the state. The ACLU of Northern California helped research and draft a friend of the court brief in the California case.

“Most of the people in South Carolina prisons have no income, so a lot of their costs — whether for phone calls or items at the commissary — falls on their families,” Hansotia said in an interview. “That is particularly difficult in a pandemic, where a lot of people are unemployed or underemployed.”

Prison commissary items include bars of soap, toothbrushes and various kinds of canned food to supplement the prison diet, Hansotia said.

According to its website, the Oakland-based Equal Justice Society initiates legal advocacy efforts on racial, ethnic and other inequities in prisons and schools, among other areas. The San Francisco law firm of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein also helped.

This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.