It is weird to say it but disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly, a man that used his wealth to abuse women, girls, and boys for years, is broke. So broke, he is being used as an example for prison finance reform, a conversation that says prisoners should not be required to pay fees in jail that they don’t have in real life.
According to The Washington Post, the man who once had a net worth of over $100 million, writing hit songs for Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and more, currently has a – $2 million and now has roughly $28,000 in a prison account.
Still, a federal judge (in total disregard of his financial standing) ordered him to pay $140,000 as part of his sentence.
This is not uncommon. Many inmates are expected, as a part of their penalty) to pay court-ordered victim fees.
The report states, “The Federal Bureau of Prisons has been pushing back against efforts to make inmates paymuch more of their court-ordered restitution to crime victims, in part because the money they would use helps fund salary and benefits for hundreds of agency staff positions, documents and interviews show.”
One expert named Jack Donson, who is a retired Bureau of Prisons case manager coordinator who currently consults on the federal prison system, says the fact that this is a conversation sheds light on how “dysfunctional” the prison bureau is.
Donson said some officials are more “focused on preserving the flow of money through commissary accounts —known within the agency as the ‘Trust Fund,’ than actual justice for the inmate serving his or her time.
“At meetings, staffers often referred to the Trust Fund as a ‘slush fund,’ so I have always been suspicious of it,” Donson said.
He is pushing to have this changed.
If the rules about prisoner finances are changed, Kelly will be one of the inmates positively impacted by the vote.
Kelly, who has shared publicly how broke he is since being sentenced to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking, has about$28,000 in his prison account, sources say.
These same individuals close to the case say the multi-Grammy winner also owes $140,000 in court-ordered fines. Court records report that included in the six-digit fee is a $40,000 penalty placed on the convicted child molester for a fund for human trafficking victims.
Though prosecutors have the right to demand it, they have not asked a judge to make the Bureau of Prisons confiscate that money. Possibly because they know he doesn’t have it.
And you can’t get blood out of a turnip … or in this case a Pied Piper.
