Life in the prison economy

[Timsup2nothin]

For that extra flavor of slavery, they even force inmates to work for next to nothing while they're in prison, then charge exorbitant rates for every basic service of life or any of the few allowable amenities. Our system of justice is grossly unfair and should be massively reformed. There have been positive starts in that direction in the last decade but it isn't enough.

Having seen the operation of the criminal justice system, US federal level, in action from up close I'm certainly in favor of reform. Despite having no dispute with regards to my own case, I have plenty of anecdotes that should, and usually do, set people's hair on fire. But that's not what this thread is intended to be about.

This is meant to provide an insight into the economic life of an inmate, because that part about slave labor and stuff is somewhat...overstated IMO. Make that one particular inmate, because I don't want to get into a whole back and forth over "my prison was worse" or "my brother says..." or whatever. Yes, everyone has a different experience. The Bureau of Prisons is not the same as any one of fifty state level systems and every one of them is also unique. Even within the BoP there are different levels of security that lead to vastly different circumstances. If your experience is vastly different I'm not surprised and you are welcome to start your own thread and tell me and everyone else all about it.

Questions are encouraged as we go, and I'll try to stick with it long enough to tell the whole story.

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We'll start from somewhere shortly after my arrival at my "final disposition;" a medium security federal correctional institution. During the previous six months I had laid around in an assortment of county jails and a BoP "intake facility" where there is really not much to say about the economies because they are totally transient populations. The MS-FCI is the polar opposite though; no flavor of 'transience' in that population.

This is where that "forced to work" thing becomes rubber meeting the road. Yes, I was told that I would have to have a job. Inmates who refused to take a job received no pay and were not allowed to have money put on their books from outside, and were assigned to an "indigent room." During room searches of the indigent room anything that wasn't minimum prison issue was considered contraband, since the indigent had no way to buy anything and therefor must have gotten it by some means outside the rules. That certainly looked like no fun so I opted for a job and got assigned to a construction crew at 'entry level' pay of about $20.00 a month.

The construction crews worked out of the 'construction yard' under the supervision of a construction cop. Two cops, two crews. The facilities of the FCI were pretty much all maintained by the construction crews. Office has a busted doorknob? File a repair ticket with the construction department. Recreation department wants to build a horseshoe pit? File a ticket with the construction department. Perimeter car, which goes round and round and round outside the outer fence 24/7/365 driven at an idle by a guard that has to have the most horribly boring existence of any human being ever encountered crashes through the fence because he fell asleep? Yeah, fences and such are not within the scope of inmate labor, not our problem.

This is where "having a job" diverges from "forced to work." A job on the construction crews meant that I had to show up for "work call" counts at the construction yard; one not terribly long after breakfast and one not terribly long after lunch. During working hours, if I was not out working a ticket then I was locked in the construction yard. There were more than enough guys to work the tickets, so as a level one new guy if I didn't jump up and make it known that I wanted to get out there I was perfectly welcome to hang around and listen to the radio and play cards or whatever.

That was my first prison job.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

You literally have the gross spectacle of an all white group of wardens forcing PoC to work for a pittance.

It's essentially slavery by any other name.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm not opposed to prison labour but the US system is terrible.

1. Voluntary

2. Public service type work

3. If the pay is low it's a positive on parole recommendation.

I'm not sure if we even have it here. I've only seen prisoner en masse outside a prison once and it was for exercise.

Basically you volunteer for brownie points for parole.

 

[MaryKB]

Your post is interesting @Timsup2nothin, I'd love to hear more about your experiences.

 

[Arwon]

Was this California? Would I be right in assuming that California prisons would be less, uh, plantationy than ones in the old slave owning states?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Was this California? Would I be right in assuming that California prisons would be less, uh, plantationy than ones in the old slave owning states?

Federal (US) Bureau of Prisons.

You literally have the gross spectacle of an all white group of wardens forcing PoC to work for a pittance.

It's essentially slavery by any other name.

Well, since I am not a PoC and the majority of my supervisors, including the construction cop who was the supervisor on my first prison job were the reality does not fully mesh with your statement here.

Your post is interesting @Timsup2nothin, I'd love to hear more about your experiences.

I'll certainly get to that.

 

[stinkubus]

Your own experience is not indicative of the system as a whole, nor should it be taken as such. Yet you still invite us to make conclusions about it based on nothing but your anecdotes.

Was this California? Would I be right in assuming that California prisons would be less, uh, plantationy than ones in the old slave owning states?

California was the first to institute mass incarceration via its "Three Strikes" law. The predictable overcrowding which followed also had them at the forefront of privatization.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

This is sure to be a long rambling thread, because there are so many things running at the same time. Rather than a closer look at my first job, and certainly before moving on to my next job, I guess some looking around at other aspects of the economy would be in order.

With my twenty dollars a month, and anything else that landed on my books (ie money orders mailed in by friends and family, which for me totaled out generally to, well, zero) I got to shop at the commissary one day a week. Commissary ran Monday through Thursday, with inmates assigned their particular day by...I have no idea. The obvious way would have been, since there were four units and four days, to have each unit go on a particular day. Had the administration opted for that it would have disabled, or at least hindered, a whole assortment of segments of the economy, all of which were technically against the rules. The fact the administration didn't do this seems to indicate that they were aware of the prison economy in operation and knew that it served a purpose in keeping the peace. Anyway...

On my designated day I got in line at the commissary when my unit let out for dinner. Juggling whether to get in the commissary line before the chow line or after was always tricky. If the commissary line ran down to nothing then the commissary would close, and the same for the chow line. One way to keep this from being a problem was to live in the cleanest unit, but that wasn't really completely up to me. The units had a weekly inspection, and the order we got turned out for dinner after the four o'clock count was determined by the results. Coming in last, obviously, would suck, but fortunately I very seldom ran into that problem.

The commissary, like everything else, was staffed by inmate labor under supervision of the commissary cops. When I got to the front of the line I handed my filled out commissary form to the guy at the next available window. He would run my total cost based on the items I checked, verify I had the funds on my books to pay for it, then hand the list to a runner who would collect my stuff and bring it back to him. A cop would watch him check each item off my list as he handed it to me, then I would sign for having gotten all my stuff, he would sign for having given me all my stuff, the cop would sign for having watched all this stuff, copies would be made and my store list would go into various files somewhere.

It might seem like twenty bucks a month wouldn't go very far, but technically everything I really needed was already provided. So commissary was pretty much luxury, and I had already learned that in life luxury comes at a high cost in things beyond straight cash so I was mostly okay. I didn't really want to be too weighed down with things that I would have to worry about getting stolen. I got a little radio that clipped on my belt, and some earbuds. I got a deck of pinochle cards and replaced them as needed. I got shampoo and conditioner, and bars of Irish Spring, because prison issue soap mostly sucked. And every commissary day I got myself an ice cream; usually an ice cream sandwich but sometimes a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

Ice creams were a core commissary commodity, since there was no place to keep them. They only allowed two per inmate, because obviously with no place to store them some guy buying a bunch of them had to be doing something against the rules, like selling them or trading them. Of course, this distinction created scarcity and made ice creams a valuable commodity. My twenty dollars a month actually covered two ice creams every commissary day, and I could trade my second ice cream, generally speaking, to someone who had a different day than I did and money on their books for about twice as much commissary stuff as the ice cream was worth. Ice creams, to a great extent, were the measure of wealth in the system. A guy who could eat an ice cream every day Monday through Thursday was obviously running at the upper end of the financial scale, where the poor and downtrodden might have to trade away both their ice creams on their commissary day just to keep batteries in their radio.

I set out to be an ice cream magnate.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Yeah, since I said exactly this:

Your own experience is not indicative of the system as a whole, nor should it be taken as such.

and then specifically said not to do this:

Yet you still invite us to make conclusions about it based on nothing but your anecdotes.

You are invited to not participate.

 

[Commodore]

1. Voluntary

I think whether or not work is voluntary is on a per prison basis. I know the prison my uncle is in down in Mississippi doesn't force inmates to work.

EDIT: Although given the nature of his crime, I wouldn't be opposed to the prison literally working him until he dropped dead from exhaustion.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I think whether or not work is voluntary is on a per prison basis. I know the prison my uncle is in down in Mississippi doesn't force inmates to work.

From what I understand from inmates who had done state time in various states, the BoP system is fairly typical. A job is usually mandatory, but whether that involves any actual work is an entirely different issue.

 

[Commodore]

From what I understand from inmates who had done state time in various states, the BoP system is fairly typical. A job is usually mandatory, but whether that involves any actual work is an entirely different issue.

My uncle is doing federal time. I don't know if that makes a difference or not.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

My uncle is doing federal time. I don't know if that makes a difference or not.

Federal time is Bureau of Prisons, which is what I am familiar with.

My job there in the construction crew is a fine example. I could have served out my entire sentence and never done any work. There were guys on the crew who showed up for work call counts every day, twice a day, and never left the construction yard. They played cards, read books, listened to their radios, and when the 'work day' ended they went back to their units and on about their lives. Generally they had money coming in to their books from outside, which they wouldn't have been able to have if they "refused work" and got listed as indigent, but they didn't actually work and I'm sure if asked they wouldn't claim that they did.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Great stuff Tim. Thanks.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Great stuff Tim. Thanks.

Welcome.

Becoming an ice cream magnate on twenty bucks a month seemed to be out of the question.

Each construction crew had a nominal 'lead guy.' He was a 'level one,' as opposed to my level four, and made about eighty bucks a month. That would buy some ice creams, but I had to discard this option. Even becoming a level three, with the big forty dollar a month paycheck, would involve actually working. The level ones not only had to take the biggest job tickets every day, and manage a handful of other guys through getting them done, they had to do a certain amount of butt sniffing with the supervisor. I considered taking an occasional small ticket that would allow me to get out of the construction yard by myself to be reasonable, but wanted no part of this group action business.

Also, the number of level ones was strictly limited. Those guys were absolutely not interested in anyone with actual construction experience coming to the attention of the cops. I didn't want to be in the group, and I probably wasn't welcome in the group. I fit in a lot better with the guys playing cards. Many of them were ice cream magnates, actually. Outside funding is a popular path to the top, and construction was an easy ride place for outside funded guys to have a job and not work. Turns out it wasn't the best one, but we'll get to that.

But at that point my options were limited. Work was out. Getting outside funding didn't appear to be in my immediate future, though there were some interesting long term possibilities glimmering there. I needed a hustle. Hustles are unofficial jobs in the prison economy.

A very common hustle was the laundry hustle. I was content to go to the prison laundry on my designated day, hand over my bag of dirty clothes and be given a bag with a replacement for each item I turned in. I kept one shirt that fit good, and one pair of pants that fit good, both in good repair, so that if I had a visitor I wouldn't look like a raggemuffin, but by and large I didn't care much. However, lots of people were more concerned and didn't want to just take their chances that they would get pants with a big patch, or a shirt missing a pocket button, or whatever. Lots of people also had weird things about wearing stuff that someone else had worn, even though the prison laundry washed everything in water that was too hot, using a disinfectant soap that was too strong. So they had to either do their own laundry in the basement laundry room, or hire someone to do it for them.

In my opinion, doing laundry sucks, even if you aren't in prison. In prison, courtesy is demanded and enforced. Not being there to take your stuff out of the washer when it stops is not an acceptable behavior, because taking someone elses stuff out of the washer is REALLY not an acceptable behavior. Any involvement with the laundry room, in fact, is definitely best left to the professionals. Guys with a laundry hustle spent their time reading, listening to their radio, whatever, down in the laundry room. They were loners, which I'm not, and mostly they had official jobs that for whatever reason allowed them to spend the day down in the unit basement rather than locked up in the construction yard. I started thinking that I probably needed one of those, but wasn't really interested in a laundry hustle.

Running a store had its attractions. When you can only get to the commissary one day a week a place where you can get chips, or a soda, or whatever, just on a whim is important. Every unit had at least one store guy. He would give you what you want, when you wanted it, and on your commissary day he would give you a list of stuff to buy for him to stock his store...at a profit. This again absolutely required an official job that allowed for loafing around the unit all day, which I didn't have. It also required funds to lay in the initial inventory. Not for me.

This is a good time to mention one of the things, maybe the biggest thing, that I might miss about prison. You might be thinking "how does the store guy know he'll get paid?" The laundry guy too; he does your laundry every week, and once a month he gives you a commissary list with ten or fifteen bucks worth of stuff on it. What if you just say "no, not gonna pay"? The answer is WORD. You might think that signing a contract means you will pay your car payments. You might think that a "handshake deal" is the real deal. But in prison you are absolutely only as good as your word, and everyone works very hard to keep that good.

EVERYTHING in the prison economy runs on "I will pay you on commissary day" or "I will have my people send some money to your books" and if you ever don't come through then you are REMOVED from access to EVERYTHING. Guys playing dominoes for loser does pushups...they won't play with you. No store guy will do business with you. No one will trade you an ice cream on not your commissary day for any offered payment. No bookie will take your bets. You are OUT until you have made good your debts, and even then you will have to operate at some low crippled level for a long time to make your word good again.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Can I ask what was the food like ?
Was watching some food program in the UK and the Navy had the same budget as UK Prison for food. The Navy food looked alright
Did family or friends come and give you food and other luxuries ?

I did read that the US Prison system is in crisis in some states with Prison murders on the rise and gang violence.
That is pretty frightening

But Prisons in Russia are worse. Guard will beat and starve prisoners to extract protection money from families

 

[cardgame]

Can I ask what was the food like ?
Was watching some food program in the UK and the Navy had the same budget as UK Prison for food. The Navy food looked alright
Did family or friends come and give you food and other luxuries ?

I did read that the US Prison system is in crisis in some states with Prison murders on the rise and gang violence.
That is pretty frightening

But Prisons in Russia are worse. Guard will beat and starve prisoners to extract protection money from families

I have heard that many prison facilities (as Tim has and probably will mention again, there are many levels of them operating at different levels of independence) share food vendors with public schools. Same food goes to each place. Ah, but you're Australian, so you can't immediately relate.



Nasty corn, passable fruit, the iconic and oft-praised square pizza. Greasy. Not sure if the pizza would have been available in prisons, it's generally considered the top tier entree. One milk carton, 235mL. Probably no chocolate flavor. Probably no pretzel. Maybe a bread roll. Definitely no metal cutlery.

 

[Zardnaar]

They built a new prison here but they had to install under floor heating and the prisoners got steak.

Some law requires government buildings heated to 18 degrees centigrade minimum.

 

[MaryKB]

@Timsup2nothin what's wrong with doing laundry? That sounds like a really easy "racket."

 

[Narz]

I have heard that many prison facilities (as Tim has and probably will mention again, there are many levels of them operating at different levels of independence) share food vendors with public schools. Same food goes to each place. Ah, but you're Australian, so you can't immediately relate.



Nasty corn, passable fruit, the iconic and oft-praised square pizza. Greasy. Not sure if the pizza would have been available in prisons, it's generally considered the top tier entree. One milk carton, 235mL. Probably no chocolate flavor. Probably no pretzel. Maybe a bread roll. Definitely no metal cutlery.

Ugh, besides the horrific loss of my freedom, the threat to my physical safety from guards & other inmates & lack of female companionship my next two tops fears of prison would having to deal with a snoring roommate (I despise snoring & am a bit of a princess about my sleep) & the food (I love eating what I want when I want as opposed to the lowest possible quality goop possible).

To keep this on topic, I'll say that likely the #1 thing I imagine I'd spent any money earned from working on would be better quality food (unless I was in a really violent place then I'd spend it on protection).