Prison Currency
As everyone knows, in prison you use cigarettes as a medium of exchange. Except in 2004, federal prisons banned smoking. Ergo, they banned cigarettes. Ergo, you need a new medium of exchange. Thus, via Alex Tabarrok, the rise of the mackerel:
Mr. Muntz says he sold more than $1 million of mackerel for federal prison commissaries last year. It accounted for about half his commissary sales, he says, outstripping the canned tuna, crab, chicken and oysters he offers.
Unlike those more expensive delicacies, former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few — other than weight-lifters craving protein — want to eat it.
I can think of some good reasons for the rule preventing prisoners from holding cash (”Money they get from prison jobs . . . or family members goes into commissary accounts that let them buy things such as food and toiletries”) but the mackerel situation seems a bit absurd. It seems to me that the prison system ought to create an in-house currency like Disney Dollars or chips at a casino for prisoners to use as a medium of exchange.
46 Responses to “Prison Currency”
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October 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I think I like my prison medium of exchange a bit absurd.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
People in prison seem to be clever.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Maybe the whole US dollar can go on the mackerel standard.
The problem with funny money is that you need to validate that it is real. In prison, I can imagine that not even real cash would be very safe to use.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Not sure I understand. Money is money be it cigarettes, canned Mach, disney dollars. So if there are good reasons to restrict holding currency, do not those reasons apply to all currency?
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:42 pm
I’m not sure I understand. There’s an actual demand for cigarettes but not one for mackerel. So you can hire someone to shank your rival for a couple cartons of smokes. But who will shank your rival for a few cases of mackerel? Are you able to deposit your mackerel back into the commissary account for its cash value? I just don’t see a prison kingpin rising to power based on his or her monopoly over the mackerel trade.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Big Sneezy–I imagine you don’t have any practical use for those green pieces of paper in your wallet either. If you like, I’ll dispose of them for you free of charge!
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Sounds like Krugman’s “Babysitter” story to me. Somehow the part of it that’s “absurd” got past me.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howfast.html
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
One of the reasons you don’t want prisoners holding dollar currency is so that they can’t use it to bribe guards and otherwise make purchases for things outside of the prison world. Mackerels, oddly enough, are not an accepted currency outside of the prison world, and it’s not at all clear that they can be freely exchanged for dollars.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
It’s especially funny because hard on the heels of saying how absurd using can of mackerel is, Yglesias proceeds to toss out the oh-so-serious suggestion of using “Disney Dollars”.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It seems to me that the prison system ought to create an in-house currency like Disney Dollars or chips at a casino for prisoners to use as a medium of exchange.
Handjobs are illiquid.
People in prison seem to be clever.
They are generally clever at working the edges within a very constrained system.
It’d be a rotten thing, though, if mackerel got overfished to keep the prison currency system running. Perhaps it can be part of the buyout: send all the mack to Spain in return for Euros.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Currency is just a measuement standard. Jail currency has an outside the wall realtionship. If I have my friend pay a guard to smuggle in heroin and want to assure a return on my outside investment I need a way to measure and record. Since I can’t have dollars 1 mackeral = 1 dollar.
There are prison gangs that control huge outside crimanl enterprises and those cans of fish are just part the inside part of the business.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Dan Miller-
What I mean to say is, lacking access to real-world currency, the prisoners will certainly use some other currency. But lacking any vehicle for converting their prison currency back to real-world currency, they are probably going to use some item that always has a use and a market, that can always be turned over from person to person because there will always be someone with a need for the item. Hence, cigarettes. I just don’t see how the mackerel market matches up, except maybe the role of those weight-lifters is understated and they effectively act as mackerel addicts. Personally, toilet paper seems more useful.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
And it seems to me the whole point in eliminating cash exchange between prisoners &/or staff is that, outside of commissary items, there is no legitimacy inside of prison for a medium of exchange since such exchanges would be illegal. Sheesh, Matt. How naive.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Wouldn’t inflation be a problem? With smokes, people end up smoking them so that limits the growth of the money supply, but if nobody eats the canned fish, then the supply keeps growing.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
“It seems to me that the prison system ought to create an in-house currency like Disney Dollars or chips at a casino for prisoners to use as a medium of exchange.”
I think something that has tangible underlying value to at least some of the prisoners will work better than a fiat currency. Cigarettes work as a currency for everyone even if only some of prisoners smoke, because a non-smoker can always trade cigs for something he wants. Protein (cans of mackerel) could also function, assuming a large enough percentage of the population are weightlifters. I think this is a safe assumption, based on your typical prison movie.
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I work in a prison and I have not seen the mackeral currency system. The closest thing in the Indiana prisons and jails is the Ramen Noodle soup market. I don’t think there is a direct soup to green dollar transfer rate, as a soup costs the guys about $.22 from commissary. The monetary value of the ramen seems to fluctuate depending on the context. For instance, one black market cigarette (which is actually about a third of a standard, filtered cigarette)=9 soups. However, a full meal from the chow hall can be exchanged for 1 soup (unless it is chicken night, then we are talking 2 soups).
To boil it down, prisoners get money put on their account monthly from working menial jobs or being enrolled in certain educational programs. Family and friends can also write money orders to be put on this account. The only access the men have of transferring these funds from one inmate to another is by trading commissary items. When you factor in fluctuating availability of the more illicit goods (drugs, sex, hooch) I find it hard to believe that any prison community sticks with a consistent currency. It is an enormous credit system, with very little chance of needing bailed out by the prison administration.
As a big fan of this blog, I was pleased to see a post related to the corrections system.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
the mackerel situation seems a bit absurd. It seems to me that the prison system ought to create an in-house currency
I think what you are failing to grasp, Matt, is that none of these transactions among prisoners are permitted under the rules of the institution. Of course, the system isn’t going to create a currency for use on the black market.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Handjobs are illiquid.
One can infer, pseudonymous in nc, that you have limited practical experience in these matters. Although I make no particular claim of expertise, it seems to me that a certain amount of liquidity is quite usual . . .
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
This has always been something I’ve found curious. But, of course, that’s because I know nothing about US corrections systems.
I do know, however, that many POW camps in WWI & WWII issued camp-specific scrip–in German, Lagergeld.
On the matter of restricting use, in WWII the US had different banknotes for Hawaii and North Africa. In case the Japanese captured Hawaii the overprinted money would become useless on the mainland. Somewhat related are MPCs–Military Payment Certificates, most famously used in Allied occupied Europe and later Vietnam.
But I think the main issue with US prison currency isn’t about it’s validity outside the prison walls…
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Rea wins
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Meant to add…win!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
People in prison seem to be clever.
They’re definitely afforded a lot of time in which to consider the prison system.
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 am
I gladly concede to rea, though I did tee it up when I realised that ‘infungible’ was inaccurate.
(My significant other works in the prison system. The first months of the year, after a smoking ban in the state prisons, were rough. Not least for the officers, who seem to smoke like chimneys.)
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
Stamps, you idiots. Mackeral? Baloney.
Unless things have changed at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary since I was there, inmates deal in books of stamps. Back then it was, what, 32 cents a stamp or something, I can’t remember. A book was discounted to $5.00 anyway from whatever it was at the time,
Sports betting is big time in prison. When people get shanked, it’s because they can pay gambling debts usually. Inmates can walk around with as much as 300 books of stamps on them – that’s $1,500 at the discounted price. Any inmate caught with large numbers of stamps on them or in their cell is immediately charged with gambling and gets the stamps confiscated and gets a “shot” (an Incident Report) or gets sent to “The Hole”.
So they distribute the stamps with other inmates. I used to count books of stamps and place a fixed number of books in envelopes, then conceal the envelopes in my cell, for some of the Boston guys. Why? because I wasn’t suspected of such by the guards, not being a professional criminal. In return, I got a free ice cream from the commissary every week, and also free pizza slices made from food stuffs smuggled out of the kitchen.
Eventually I got tired of doing this chore and told the Boston guy I quit, mostly because he kept interrupting whatever I was doing to ask me to count up a bunch of books within a short period of time.
One time the guards locked down the unit and raided every cell and the guards seized like 300 books from his cell. But they didn’t search my locker very thoroughly. I had envelopes of books of stamps shoved down into a number of file folders holding a bunch of pages of notes that I occupied my time with. After the doors were unlocked, he came running over to ask me if I still had the books I was concealing in my locker, which I did. He was mightily relieved.
And he was only the front guy for an even bigger bookie in another housing unit, IIRC.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
That should be “can’t pay gambling debts”, of course.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
The commissary system seems to make the most sense. The dealer and his gang never have to buy anything from the commissary, so their balance builds up over time.
Cigs are undoubtedly easier than trying to make sure someone buys enough shit from the commissary for you to make up for that balloon of heroin.
Cans of mackeral just seems…stupid. Why not protein bars or something that actually could be useful?
Even the books of stamps seems more legitimate. Especially if prisoners get them at a discount. You can then smuggle them out and they can be sold to poor college students.
If anything, though, I’d think phone cards might make a good prison currency.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I’ve received an update: stamps, yes; also, Honey Buns.
October 3rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Beaten to it, but: my version of the joke:
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