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“We all make mistakes in life,� Peters told me this week in an interview. “Just because we’ve made mistakes doesn’t mean the state should take our money.�

The law, passed in the late 1980s, allows the Missouri attorney general to file a lawsuit against people in prison to try to take their assets — potentially leaving them penniless when they re-enter society. It’s known as a “pay-to-stay� law. This year, Peters decided to do something about it: she’s filed , hoping to repeal MIRA in its entirety.

“People have paid their penance and served their time,� Peters says of men and women in Missouri prisons. “If this money could be the difference between them making a fresh start and not, why would we take that opportunity away from somebody?�

It’s a reaction Bevis Schock has grown accustomed to. Schock is an attorney with a decidedly libertarian bent. He’s a big fan of freedom and constitutional rights. He started researching MIRA because he had two clients who were headed to state prison and he wanted to protect their assets.

Schock thinks the law is cruel and unconstitutional. In the past year, he’s started representing people who have been sued under the law. He’s fighting back on their behalf, and he’s hoping a Cole County judge or the Missouri Supreme Court will toss the law on the trash heap of history.

Most people he’s talked to have “raised their eyebrows in disbelief� when learning about the law, he says.

What Peters and Schock recognize is that most people in prison eventually return home, or back to some community, to rebuild their lives. Take the case of Kristen Milum. She was released from the Chillicothe Correctional Center just before Christmas after serving a dozen years in prison for nonviolent burglary and theft charges.

She’s in a St. Louis halfway house now trying to rebuild her life — as soon as the courts will allow her to tap into money she had carefully saved. Some of the money was from prison jobs, but most came as gifts from family and friends.

During her dozen years behind bars, she socked away $18,500. It was her planned nest egg to rebuild her life. But before she could leave prison, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a MIRA lawsuit against her, seeking to take all the money to reimburse taxpayers for a pittance of her time behind prison.

Thanks to Columbia attorney Irene Karns, who started representing Milum after she read about her in my column, a judge decided Milum could keep about 60 percent of her money. It’s not an ideal ending, but at least Milum has some money coming her way.

“I really thought I had everything taken care of, and now I’m lost trying to figure out how I’m going to survive,� she told me last year after Bailey filed the lawsuit.

If Peters is successful in getting her bill passed in the Legislature, it will be too late for Milum but not the people in prison that get sued every year to have their money taken away.

Some of them, like Daniel Wayne Wallace, whom Schock represents, got their money in unfortunate circumstances. For Wallace, it was an insurance payment after his mom died. He is still locked up. He not only missed his mom’s funeral, but the state is now trying to take away the money she left him.

There’s also the case of Tonya Honkomp, who started preparing for the future before entering prison in 2022 on a meth possession charge. She fixed up and sold a Park Hills house left to her by a family member. Her plan was to save the money until she got out of prison and raised a baby girl. She was pregnant before entering prison; she’s hoping to be released by spring 2025.

But in April 2024, Bailey’s office sued to seize Honkomp’s money, and the case is pending.

“Our clients, of course, hope the Legislature passes and the governor signs a repeal of MIRA,� Schock says.

Meanwhile, he’s fighting the cases in court and expects them to make their way to the Missouri Supreme Court. Karns, who calls the existing law a “statutory train wreck,� agrees.

It’s the second time in six years that the Missouri Legislature is considering a bill to reduce the criminalization of poverty at the same time the issue is headed to the Missouri Supreme Court.

The last time that happened — in 2019 — there was near unanimous agreement in both public bodies that Missouri’s “pay-to-stay� culture needed an adjustment. That year, state Rep. Bruce DeGroot, a Chesterfield Republican, sponsored House Bill 192, which made it illegal to send people back to Missouri jail if they couldn’t afford to pay the “board bill� charging them rent for their time in a county jail. In two cases, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion that such a result — in effect sending people to debtors’ prison — is not just.

Peters is hoping for a repeat of history.

“We shouldn’t be kicking people while they’re down,� she says. “We should be giving them the tools to succeed.�