A jury cleared Lydia Dustin in January 1693. She died in her cell that March, still unable to pay for the months she had already served.
A seventeenth-century jail ran on money collected from the people inside it. There was a charge for each day held, a charge for food, a charge for the irons — the surviving expense accounts for 1692 list chains for Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, shackles for ten prisoners, a pair of irons for Mary Cox, and diet billed by the week. The bill had to be settled in full before the door opened, and that is what turned it from an expense into a sentence: the debt attached to imprisonment itself, not to guilt. Being found innocent removed the accusation and left the invoice exactly where it was.
For a household that had already lost its earner to the cell, and whose goods the sheriff had in many cases already carried off, the arithmetic closed. You could not earn from inside, and you could not get outside without paying.
Lydia Dustin of Reading was taken at the end of April 1692, around seventy-nine years old. She was sent first to the Boston jail and later held at Cambridge. In January 1693 a jury found her not guilty. She was not released, because the fees for the months she had already served were unpaid, and she died in the cell on March 10, 1693 — roughly ten months after her arrest, and about six weeks after the court had cleared her.
Tituba, the enslaved woman whose confession set the outbreak's shape, left by the only other available route: in April 1693 someone paid what was owed, and she was sold to the person who paid it for seven pounds. The buyer's name is not recorded.
Forty-three American states at minimum — by some counts every state but one — currently authorize what is known as pay-to-stay, billing incarcerated people for the cost of their own incarceration. Typical rates run from about twenty to eighty dollars a day, and some statutes went far past that: before a 2022 reform, Connecticut's law permitted a charge of $249 per day, which is how a woman named Teresa Beatty came out of two and a half years in prison owing $83,762.
The number that shows what the practice does is the collection rate, which studies put at roughly ten to fifteen percent. Eight or nine of every ten dollars billed are never recovered, because the people billed are overwhelmingly poor — which is why they could not make bail or hire counsel to begin with. A charge that recovers a tenth of what it bills has stopped working as a revenue measure. What it does instead is decide who gets to stay out: unpaid fees can be enforced by wage garnishment, seized tax refunds, and liens, and in documented cases the failure to pay has itself returned people to custody, where the meter starts again. That loop is the part 1692 would recognize. Lydia Dustin's fees were never collected either. The bill was not a way of recovering money from her — it was the reason the door stayed shut after the verdict opened it.
Not guilty, the court told Lydia Dustin, and then handed her the bill for the ten months.