(The Center Square) San Francisco’s former district attorney is leading a class action lawsuit requiring the state to follow through on a 1973 statute signed into law by then-governor Ronald Reagan to pay prisoners who have served more than six months $200 upon their release as “gate money.” Including interest, the case could cost taxpayers $5 billion.
With former SF DA Chesa Boudin, now Executive Director at UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, estimating California releases approximately 30,000 prisoners each year, his case says the class action body “exceeds hundreds of thousands of individuals.” Boudin says the legislature’s statute was quite clear in providing $200 (worth almost $1,500 in current dollars when it first went into effect) to prisoners when they exit prison if they aren’t being transferred to federal prison or another state .
