Historical scholarship, primary sources, and the day's doctrine all suggest that prisoners during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced wretched conditions. Curiously, in spite of the grueling circumstances they faced, incarcerated people were compelled to pay their jailers a "jail fee" or "pay-to-stay fee". This paper analyses the imposition of jail fees in the final century of the Spanish Empire in Arequipa. It seeks to establish the mechanisms by which this fee was charged, its social and cultural implications, and how it served to subsidized prison maintenance in various locations within the former Municipality of Arequipa.