It has been said that “the business of America is business”. This may be true, but the business of prison is certainly business. Money may not make the world go around, but it keeps things running smoothly in prison. Therefore most inmates put more effort into making ” money” here (generally items from the commissary) than they do towards anything else while they are in prison.
Every day – on every cell block, on every rec yard, at every job (in every prison), business is being done. For that matter – how much money you have (or can earn) is as strong a status symbol as any we have here. There are also distinct classes of inmates based upon how much money or property they have. Certain people “have money”, or have ” big money”. Some people are known as hustlers, while others are known as roaches – based on how much money they have.
Make no mistake about it: soups, stamps, or bags of coffee are just as valuable (and exchangeable) as any dollars or coins in the free-world. You can hold soups or stamps that have passed through fifty sets of hands. They’ve been carried from building to building, swept through cell blocks, and passed from cell to cell. It boils down to the fact that not everyone in prison has family or friends on the outside who send them money to buy the things they need. Or some only get money occasionally. Others even have more money than they are allowed to spend.
But just like on the outside, everyone wants more. While this greed may contribute to extortion: you can stop extortion, but you can’t possibly stop inmates from wheeling and dealing with each other. You can separate inmates, and lock them all up, one in each cell. Then they’ll just make “lines” out of string and pass things with that.
When you are assigned a job in prison, the first thing you do determine is how you can make money there. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is – there’s a way you can make money while you’re doing it. If you can’t possibly think of how your job could make you any money, don’t despair. Simply talk to the inmates who already work there. Every job in prison has some type of “fringe benefits”, just like the free world.
Kitchen workers are going to eat good. Laundry workers get to wear new clothes. People working in the garment factory custom-make their own clothes. Janitors get to move around. Pressers can press their own clothes. Once you discover what the benefits are for your job, it’s no secret that other inmates will pay for those benefits. That gets the money flowing, and it never stops.
Say you pay somebody a few stamps to press your clothes for an upcoming visit. That guy goes to chow and buys an extra piece of chicken with them. That guy decides to gamble and tries his luck on a football board. Another guy wins those stamps. He needs a deodorant and pays somebody else the stamps to buy him one. Then that guy puts them on an envelope and sends them home to mom.
Technically all of this is against the rules, but it’s been going on for as long as there have been prisons. And it actually benefits the inmates who have nobody to send them money. They jump in the cycle at one point or another and make what they need.
It doesn’t matter if your job is just sweeping floors – you can make money simply by passing money for other people. Some inmates don’t even have jobs and make money. Some get into tattooing or gambling. Others draw birthday cards or make various crafts for people to send to their families. Some people wash clothes. And some people walk around and bum off of everyone else.
It all goes back to the principle that having money makes your time easier. So from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep – even while you’re trying to sleep – you’ll see or hear people going about their business, making money. The business of prison, after all, is business.
( by Danny Matthews)
DannyBoyinExile 