CT has charged as much as $347 per day for prison stays. It can mean having to sell your dead mom’s house.

Tracy DeSenti holds a photo of her late husband Billy DeSenti at her rental home in Hamden on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026. After Billy, who spent time in prison for drug, assault and larceny charges, died in 2023, she learned she owed the state of Connecticut more than $232,000 for his prison debt and was forced to sell their house. Credit: Sarah Gordon / CT Mirror

By Ginny Monk | CT Mirror and Andrew Brown | CT Mirror 

When Tracy DeSenti’s husband died in 2023, she was so distraught, she barely got off the couch for weeks. She showered only after her adult sons threatened to spray her with a garden hose.

In the midst of her grief, as she learned to pay bills on her own and returned to work as an addiction counselor, a letter arrived from the state. Connecticut was demanding part of the inheritance she expected to receive from her husband’s estate.

DeSenti, 57, and her husband Billy DeSenti met in 2008, soon after they were released from prison, at a post-incarceration program in New Haven. The two had spent years in prison on a variety of drug and — in Billy’s case — assault and larceny charges that stretched back to the early 1990s, but in the 15 years that followed, they turned their lives around. They found work. They volunteered in their community.

And they bought a house for $266,500 — a 1959 split-level in North Branford where they installed a saltwater pool soon after moving in, a back porch Bill DeSenti rebuilt with teak wood, a charming fireplace in the family room where they put in a “ridiculous leather couch” as a celebration for their accomplishments. DeSenti describes it as the first “fancy” thing she ever bought.

They loved that house, and to them, being home felt like being on vacation, said DeSenti, who was first on her own at 13 and was arrested for the first time as an adult in her 20s.

But now Billy was dead, and the state of Connecticut said he owed $232,733 for room and board during his earlier prison stay. Selling the house where DeSenti now lived alone would help satisfy that debt.

“It felt like we were being punished all over again, despite everything we had just accomplished,” DeSenti told the court in 2024, as she begged to keep the house.

In the end, the state Department of Administrative Services — which serves as the state’s collection agency — successfully argued that DeSenti needed to sell the home she’d lived in for nearly 10 years to satisfy what ultimately amounted to roughly $21,000 of her husband’s debt. Probate court took the property, and DeSenti was then locked out of the house, unable to even finish moving out.

She now lives in a house where the rent is more than double the monthly cost of her old mortgage.

DeSenti’s experience is not unique. She is one of hundreds of Connecticut residents who have had money seized in the last five years through a state law that dates back more than three decades. That law enables the Connecticut Department of Correction to charge a fee for every day a person spends in prison and then collect on that debt in certain situations.

If a formerly incarcerated person wins the lottery, for example, collects an inheritance or receives certain lawsuit settlements, the state can take up to half the money to satisfy the debt.

The same is true in cases where a former prisoner dies and leaves money or other assets to their children, spouses and heirs.

Other states and the federal government have similar laws on the books, commonly referred to as “pay to stay” statutes, but Connecticut’s is one of the harshest, a Connecticut Mirror investigation has found. That’s because the daily cost that Connecticut bills to prisoners is one of the highest in the country. 

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CT has charged as much as $347 per day for prison stays. It can mean having to sell your dead mom’s house.