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Kristen Milum’s case was on the docket. She’s the 40-year-old woman I wrote about earlier this year who has been in a Missouri prison since she was 28 for nonviolent burglary and theft charges. She’s due to get out two days before Christmas, and she had saved about $18,500 to get a new start on life when she regains her freedom. The money came from jobs she had in prison and gifts over the years from friends and family.

In August, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit seeking to seize Milum’s money and leave her with nothing. Like most states, Missouri has a law — the Incarceration Reimbursement Act — that allows it to seize assets from people in prison, ostensibly to pay for their incarceration. The money Bailey seizes from prisoners is barely a drop in the ocean of the Department of Corrections budget, but it means everything to people like Milum.

After I wrote about Milum, Columbia attorney Irene Karns met with her and asked if she could represent her. On the Tuesday after Election Day, Karns asked Limbaugh to go ahead with a trial and make a decision on the money so Milum would know what she faced after leaving the Chillicothe Correctional Center.

Limbaugh, as he had in two other cases in which Karns represented Missouri inmates, let Milum keep most of her money. The state will still take 40 percent of it, he decided, but Milum will have about $10,000 to rebuild her life.

It’s something. But the judge, Missouri lawmakers and the Missouri Supreme Court should also take measure of where voters stand on a related issue.

The week before Limbaugh’s ruling, Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected Amendment 6. That was the issue, put on the ballot by lawmakers, that would have overturned two unanimous Missouri Supreme Court decisions on fees in the criminal justice system.

Had Amendment 6 passed, Missouri sheriffs and prosecutors would have been able to charge fees in every court case in the state to raise money for their retirements. Those fees are paid mostly by poor people who can least afford them, even though sheriffs and prosecutors already have access to a state retirement system. The sheriffs and their allies in the Legislature tried to pitch the amendment as a pro-law-enforcement measure, but that’s not what it was.

It was an unconstitutional back-door tax, and Missouri voters saw through it. More than 60 percent of them voted no on Amendment 6. Here’s the remarkable part: the Democrats voted no. Republicans voted no. Every county in the state but one — Andrew County in northwest Missouri — voted no.

The result caught the attention of national advocates working to end the criminalization of poverty in America — that pervasive element of the criminal justice system where courts use fines and fees to punish poor people and make it harder for them to recover from minor scrapes with the law.

“The people of Missouri rejected the idea that charging people fees is how you should pay for the government’s responsibilities,� said Priya Sarathy Jones, deputy executive director of the nonprofit “The reason we are having success on this issue is that people understand that most people are just trying to survive these days. There are a lot of people struggling to make it, and they’re looking for real solutions.�

Some of the folks struggling are people who leave prison and come back to their communities. The process becomes much more difficult when the state slaps a back-door tax on them before they come home.

That’s why Karns and two St. Louis-area attorneys, Bevis Schock and Dave Nelson, have waged a legal battle to get the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act declared unconstitutional. Several cases are on their way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which will ultimately decide whether the state allows people to rebuild their lives after prison or sentences them to a lifetime of poverty.

“When I get out of prison, I will have to work two jobs just to make it out there,� Milum wrote the court after Bailey sued her. “We are told in the Department of Corrections to save our money. So I did.�

On Dec. 23, she is scheduled to walk out of prison. Bailey plans to take about $8,000 from her savings. It’s a lump of coal in her stocking, two days before Christmas, courtesy of the state of Missouri.