The proposed NY bill seems fairly reasonable.  The big problem I have with these sorts of laws is that most people who go to prison already are of low income and have few prospects.  If you bill them for their stay, you're basically taking away any chance of them putting aside (or maintaining) enough seed money to do something with themselves once they get out of prison.  If you leave jail with a few bucks in the bank and some job training, maybe you'll make something of yourself.  If you leave jail owing $50k for your incarceration, have been brutally raped a few times and abused by the guards, what are the odds you feel like giving up your life of crime?

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

    Along the lines of the criminal who stated, "they tried me in my absence, convicted me in my absence, and they can hang me in my absence", I can't go along with anything along these lines, especially considering the continued illegality of marijuana*. The state can declare it wrong to smoke a drug that's been used by humans for over 2000 years, but actually charging someone for this imposition- on top of taking away their freedom- is going way too far. And if you only charge folks for committing some crimes and not others . . well, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
    Why should taxpayers have to fork out to keep them locked up? Because, presumably, taxpayers benefit from having these wrongdoers off the street. Seems simple enough to me, but then I'm not trying to get elected to anything.

    *This is not the only example one could use, but is one of the strongest, IMO.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

It seems to me that this would violate the equal treatment under the 14th amendment. You are essentially punishing some people more than others for the same crime based on their assets. If it was a flat rate like Jersey, I can see how it passes muster..but others wtf?

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

So is the amount indexed for inflation?  Or will poor people 50 years from now making the equivalent of $10000 today be required to pay the entire cost of their prison stay?

I do not like the idea that people will be required to pay for the privilege of being in prison, when they didn't want to be in prison in the first place.  So if you are in prison and refuse to pay, do you then get sentenced to additional prison time for this crime?  And if you then also refuse to pay for your additional prison time, then does your prison sentence expand indefinitelty?  The end result of that would be that instead of paying less to imprison someone, the taxpayers will pay more.

If the government wants to take away someone's money (or some portion thereof) they can always impose a fine.  I actually do think that it is generally better to fine criminals rather than to imprison them; fines raise money for the government, and imprisoning people costs the government money.  Of course, genuinely dangerous criminals do still need to be imprisoned, but the US is far too quick to imprison people, as seen by the ridiculously large prison population.  If there are that many dangerous criminals in the US, something has gone seriously wrong.