For Cecily McMillan, getting mail while incarcerated was a complex project. Any letter that was sent to her went through a metal detector and was opened by correctional officers before landing in the mailroom, where she had a two-hour window to collect it on a good day, she said.
McMillan was living in the Rikers Island facility, a city-run jail complex in Queens, N.Y., but that did not stop the clock on her student loan payments. McMillan was serving a 58-day stint for assaulting a police officer, who tried to remove her from Zuccotti Park on the night of March 17, 2012, when people had assembled to mark the Occupy Wall Street protests. Eight months after she was released, McMillan realized she had missed a letter from a government debt collector warning that one of her federal student loans was coming due. She ended up defaulting on her loan, leading that debt to balloon 35 percent to more than $7,600. In all, she had more than $100,000 in student debt.
