How the prison economy works. By Richard Davies

By Dilip -
Today there are almost 2.3 million prisoners in the US – by far the highest number of any country in the world. Louisiana today has the second-highestincarceration rate in the US (after Oklahoma overtook it in 2018), with a male incarceration rate that far exceeds the national average, and Angola is the state’s only maximum-security jail. It is also the country’s largest, covering an 18,000-acre site that is larger than Manhattan. On a mission to investigate the world’s most extreme economies, I set out for Angola. My hunch was that I would find examples of simplistic barter; what I discovered was an innovative, complex and modern system of hidden trade that offers an important lesson about the way economies work.

Serving prisoners and ex-convicts say the first law of prison economics is unsatisfied demand and the innovation that it stimulates. Cut off from the outside, prisoners find themselves lacking staples and unable to make choices that they had previously taken for granted. The urge to get hold of simple material goods is strong, and prisoners I met described the first few weeks inside as a shock during which time they learn the rules of their new world and adapt to the reality that they have lost not only their freedom but also their possessions. Today in Louisiana new inmates receive basic supplies: standard-issue clothing, a bar of soap and some lotion. But there are lots of day-to-day items they lack and want: deodorant, decent jeans, better sneakers. It was the same in the 1960s, Rideau told me when we met in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital: while you got simple provisions, a lot of effort went into getting hold of extra comforts.

Some goods are available via official channels, but getting hold of them takes a long time. When a prisoner in Angola orders a book or is sent one, it can take six months, or longer, to reach them, since censors need to check the content. The delay is an example of a general theme in the Louisiana prison economy: it operates in a time warp… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/30/prison-economy-informal-markets-alternative-currencies

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