A not-guilty verdict did not automatically erase the costs attached to confinement.
Surviving 1692 expense accounts show charges for prisoners' diet and for restraints such as chains, shackles, and irons. John Arnold's account, for example, lists chains for Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, shackles for ten prisoners, irons for Mary Cox, and weekly diet charges.
Those costs mattered at release. Salem Witch Museum's chronology notes that in January 1693 accused people were free to go upon paying their jail fees. A person could therefore survive accusation and trial yet still face a financial barrier at the prison door.
Lydia Dustin of Reading was arrested in 1692 and held for months. In January 1693 she was found not guilty, but she remained in custody because the fees were unpaid. She died in jail on March 10, 1693. The Cambridge jailkeeper's surviving account records both her continued confinement after trial and her death.
Tituba's case shows another version of the same economic dependency. After surviving the crisis, she remained imprisoned until someone paid the amount owed; the historical record then loses track of her under the new ownership arrangement.
Charging incarcerated people for the costs of confinement did not disappear with colonial jails. Modern “pay-to-stay” laws and correctional fees exist in a very different legal system and vary by jurisdiction, but legal scholarship continues to document the same basic policy problem: costs imposed during incarceration can follow a person after the criminal case itself is over.
The comparison is structural, not numerical. Modern statutes change, so this archive does not treat a particular state count or daily rate as part of the permanent Salem record.
The verdict answered the charge. It did not necessarily pay the jailer.