It's relatively easy to forgive debt that's targeting people with virtually no ability to repay it. You're not losing money simply because you've stopped sending out collections calls and notices to people who have nothing to give you. The fees total appears to have reached this level precisely because so few people were paying it.
a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal.
...
“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,”
Outright sadistic to set bonds your suspect can't afford, then charge them for incarceration even after acquittal. These are very nakedly predatory fines, designed to keep certain people in poverty.
Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in.
“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts.
The entire nut of the problem. It's merely a collections racket. The system exists to do what it does, which is to hound people released from prison into perpetuity.