Within a few months of The Times article, a headline in The Detroit News asked whether Mr. Dawkins should be allowed to profit from tragedy. Not long after that story appeared, Mr. Dawkins received the court summons, demanding partial “reimbursement to the state for Defendant’s cost of care while incarcerated.”

Image Kimberly Knutsen says the deal her partner, Mr. Dawkins, landed for “The Graybar Hotel” has helped support their family. Credit... Leah Nash for The New York Times

Michigan is one of more than 40 states where prisoners can be forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Laws that allow the government to charge prisoners “room and board” or “cost of care” fees have proliferated in recent decades, as states charge inmates and parolees for everything from medical care, clothing and meals to police transport, public defense fees, drug testing and electronic monitoring.

Since so many prisoners are impoverished to begin with, states typically don’t raise much money by charging inmates room and board fees, and in some states, the enforcement of these laws is conditional on the prisoner’s ability to pay. But as the cost of mass incarceration has soared, with more than 2.2 million adults in prisons and jails across the United States, some states have grown more aggressive in seeking money from prisoners and formerly incarcerated people.

During the last fiscal year, Michigan collected some $3.7 million from 294 prisoners, who account for just a fraction of the state’s nearly 40,000 inmates. Around the country, some 10 million people owe $50 billion in fees stemming from their arrest or imprisonment, according to a 2015 Brennan Center report.

States often take a percentage of the earnings inmates receive through prison work programs. But some states have also sought money from prisoners who have received larger sums, through an inheritance or legal settlements or, as in Mr. Dawkins’s case, money they acquire through their own initiative. After an Illinois inmate who was serving a 15-month sentence for a drug conviction received a $31,690 settlement for his mother’s death, he was forced to pay the state nearly $20,000 for the cost of his imprisonment, leaving him nearly destitute when he was paroled in 2015.

In Florida, a convict named Jeremy Barrett who received a $150,000 settlement from the Department of Corrections for negligence, after he was attacked in 2011 by another inmate who gouged out his eye, was forced to pay the state nearly $55,000 from the settlement as reimbursement for his three years in prison.

When prisoners and former inmates fight such charges, courts often rule in the state’s favor. In 2000, Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled that Eric Ham, who was serving a 50-year sentence for murder, had to pay nearly $900,000 toward the cost of his incarceration, after he won a settlement of around $1 million from the city of New Haven for falsely arresting him for another crime that he didn’t commit.