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“Personally, I don’t disagree with being responsible for costs that would generate relief for innocent taxpayers,� Brownfield emailed me from the Jefferson City Correctional Center this week.

The 68-year-old is currently finishing a burglary and fugitive sentence from long ago. When he gets out on parole — he’s scheduled to be released next year — he’ll have to pay various costs of his supervision. Such laws are made with “just intent,� Brownfield believes. He’s OK with that.

But the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act? That’s a different story.

The law allows Missouri’s attorney general to sue some prison inmates and seize their assets, applying the money to the cost of their incarceration. In most cases, the lawsuits are filed after an inmate comes into a little bit of money, such as when a relative dies. Most of the defendants don’t have attorneys and never go to court. Some try to fight the seizure from their prison cells. The state receives a pittance compared to the overall Department of Corrections budget.

Last year, for instance, the budget was almost $187 million. The revenue obtained from incarceration lawsuits filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was $450,000. That means no measurable relief for taxpayers. But there are significant costs for inmates who are losing, in some cases, 90 percent of the income they need to help re-integrate into society.

Who pays the costs when inmates get out of prison and need extra help? Taxpayers.

“In my case, MIRA isn’t granting the intended relief to taxpayers,� Brownfield wrote me, “but will end up as a means of double taxation upon them as I will now have a need for assistance that I otherwise would not have needed.�

On Tuesday, Brownfield’s attorney, Irene Karns of Columbia, was in court making that same argument.

“He wants to buy a pickup,� Karns told Cole County Associate Circuit Court Judge Chris Limbaugh, who hears most of the MIRA cases.

Brownfield has training in welding and plans to get a job in that field when he’s out of prison. “A man can’t work without a good vehicle,� Karns said.

Bailey sued Brownfield last year, trying to seize $35,000 that Brownfield received from a federal lawsuit settlement two years ago with Corizon Health, Inc. The settlement stems from an injury Brownfield received while he was an inmate in Kansas. He was trying to fix a broken ice machine, in a job he was assigned in the prison. Two of his fingers were nearly sliced off. After he was taken to the hospital, a doctor suggested immediate surgery. The prison said no, according to court records. The hospital sewed his fingers on and prescribed him pain medication.

According to the lawsuit, the prison didn’t give him the pain meds and failed to properly care for the fingers. They are still attached, but not very functional. Prison health care is notoriously poor, and Brownfield’s settlement was not uncommon.

Here’s the absurd kicker: had Brownfield been hurt in a Missouri prison, Bailey wouldn’t be able to touch the settlement. That’s because Missouri courts have said it would be an injustice for the state to seize money obtained by a prisoner in a lawsuit against the state, punishing the inmate for defending their civil rights. Karns is asking Limbaugh to apply the same logic to Brownfield’s settlement.

She’s making the same argument in the case of Ronnie Pope. The St. Louis man was assaulted by a guard in the City Justice Center while awaiting trial for theft. After I wrote about Bailey trying to seize Pope’s $12,000 settlement, Karns, a 75-year-old retired public defender who mostly does pro-bono legal work now, called Pope. She now represents him.

“Even modest awards, as in Mr. Pope’s case, have great significance for the prisoner,� she wrote in a legal filing in the case. “Equally important, the awards demonstrate to society that the legal system is willing to remedy violations of the constitutional rights of the powerless.�

There’s nothing in the MIRA law that has anything to do with public safety. The decisions Limbaugh makes in the cases won’t add or subtract a single day from defendants’ sentences. None of the money goes to crime victims. It’s purely about the attorney general seizing money because he can.

Karns is now one of several Missouri attorneys — Bevis Schock of Clayton and Michael Shipley of Kansas City are two others — who are challenging the constitutionality of a law passed in 1988 amid the nation’s rise in mass incarcerations. Lawmakers at that time were willing to throw people in prison and toss away the key, metaphorically speaking, but were less willing to fund a large expansion of state corrections budgets. So they passed a law that purported to have inmates fund some of their own costs.

“The money in these cases is nothing to the state,� Karns says.

But those dollars are everything to inmates who need to get apartments, transportation, food and clothing when they get out of prison and come home to St. Louis, or other communities, to rebuild their lives. Brownfield and Pope are the first MIRA cases for Karns, and she hopes her advocacy makes a difference.

“It’s a privilege as a lawyer to be able to do something morally right that is also right in the law,� she says. “Those two things don’t often come together.�