10 ms·

Prison Money Diaries: What People Make (and Spend) Behind Bars

123 points by minhduong243 4y ago

garrettgrimsley 4y ago
I was incarcerated from Feb 2017 to Jan 2018. Five of those months were spent in Edgecombe County Jail, six months in Albemarle District Jail, and a few nights in Wake County Jail (downtown location, not Hammond Road). The reason for moving around is because I was a Federal detainee. The Federal government contracts with various local jails for housing prior to being transferred to a permanent facility post-sentencing, release, or deportation. In the three locations I named, there are limited opportunities for State inmates to work, and none for Federal ones. Despite this, people found ways to earn an income. The article touched on some of those ways, but many went unmentioned. Here are hustles that I have firsthand knowledge of: Bookie, football pool: I inherited this game from Jakym Tibbs in Albemarle. The way it worked is that players would pay a $1-equivalent commissary item in exchange for an entry slip. On the slip they would select the winning teams from each Sunday NFL matchup, and an exact total score from a specific matchup as a tiebreaker. I collected the slips and commissary, and then recorded it onto a master sheet. I would take a cut of the prize pool. It was practically no income, just for some Sunday fun. Tattooist, stick and poke: Ink can be created from soot or sourced from a flex-pen[0] and a staple or other small piece of metal will serve as a needle. Sell tattoos. Tattooist, tattoo gun. Create a tattoo gun using a motor from a beard trimmer, a toothbrush, and a straightened and sharpened spring from an illicit ballpoint pen. This tool allows for much larger and more lucrative works, but is harder to conceal. Sell tattoos. Vinter: Prison wine is called "Buck" in the North Carolina system. Buck is made by combining some bread, fruits, and a generous helping of sugar procured via Trustees. For small batches of Buck you can ferment it in individual bottles. For larger batches, double up a couple of clean garbage bags. You can make gallons of Buck this way, and then distribute it into bottles after it has finished fermenting. Sell the resulting product. Pharmacist: Drugs can be smuggled into a jail via a corrupt guard, an inmate[1] entering from the street, or the mail. As for the mail, Suboxone strips are small enough to conceal in a letter. Practically anything else can be obtained by way of guards or inmates from outside. For rolling papers they would impregnate normal paper with a coffee mixture and then dry that out and use it for smoking marijuana. Obtain drugs and sell them for a markup. Porn Merchant: Pornography is prohibited and so there is a market for it. You can rent or sell single pornographic images or an entire magazine of it. Tailor: In Edgecombe the dress code was lax, and destruction of jumpsuits was not punished. Jumpsuits can be modified into a two-piece outfit, which allows for better range of motion. This makes your outfit more comfortable and is advantageous in fights. Obtain a razor or other sharpened blade and cut a jumpsuit in half at the waist. Cut vertical slits around the top of the shorts/pants and then run a string through those slits to act as a belt. Charge for this service. Poker Dealer/Player: Poker chips were created by ripping up a deck of cards. The dealer took a percentage of the buy-in, and also played at the table. Cheating is met with violence. Spades Player: You and a partner learn how to play Spades and go try your hand at the table. The buy-in to a game of Spades was a $1-equivalent commissary item. Some people would play this for 5+ hours a day, round after round, back to back to back, without speaking a word. You also had thieves and strong arm robbers. If someone stole from you then you would have to meet it with violence, "check off" (get yourself transferred out of the unit), or become a target of increased predation. I think I've basically covered everything that I encountered as far as money-making goes. The cooking, haircutting, and laundry side-hustles basically worked as described in the article. Edit: Thought of some more! Artist, weaver, and hair braiding. The weaver created and sold little bracelets with designs on them. The artists took commissions, and the braiders did hair. [0] Pen in a flexible, translucent rubber casing. See Shomer-Tec Prison Pen. While you could make the barrel wide enough to comfortably write with, the ballpoint tips on these are completely worthless. [1] In the prisons you have green-clothes and brown-clothes, low and high security. I am told that some in green-clothes are eligible for employment in state services outside of the facility. Groundskeeping at the state ferry system, for example. During your work detail you can collect a parcel of contraband and then smuggle it back into the facility. It is then sold.
- nighthawk454 4y ago
  Fascinating, thank you for sharing and in such detail
  - garrettgrimsley 4y ago
    Welcome! Incarcerated life is like an entirely different universe, to the point that people on the inside refer to life outside as "out there in the world." Experiencing it was very interesting in addition to horrifying.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Yikes. This is why I support only under 30 days or life without parole incarceration, other punishments should be Singapore-style caning. I don’t think I should have to live next to people who lived in a place like what you describe.
  - Clent 4y ago
    Physical punishment is cruel at any level. When does it become ok to intentionally harm another creature? Why is 'they don't understand' applicable to animals that are not also humans, we are judged by those of us we treated the poorliest. Much could be resolved by attacking the lack of goal based outcomes from the criminal system. Perhaps influenced by punishment culture in American. Most state funded institutions are incentivized to produce good outcomes or lose control of their funding and eventually employment. The same should apply to the prison system. Shut them down, reorganize. Repeat until we achieve desired affected. America has become a no nothing culture. Watch agape, engagingly discuss, wait until next distraction. There is no problem America cannot ignore if they work together. Paradoxically, there is no problem America can work together to solve.
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      What's your proposal for dealing with rapists/murderers/child abusers/etc? If it doesn't involve shooting them to Neptune, explain how you will keep them permanently out of my life.
idoh 4y ago
What a fascinating and sad article. $0.10 an hour is an unreal, unreasonably low rate. And the lack of necessities like soap is startling.
- 14 4y ago
  I wouldn’t treat my enemies that bad. And we spend a lot of time judging other countries and how they treat prisoners. What prisoners need is a prisoners union but prisons have built protections into preventing communications between jails. If all prisoners went on strike at the same time many things that rely on slave labour would come to a quick stop and the slave labour money machine would come to a crashing stop.
- okasaki 4y ago
  How much should they be paid? Presumably not as much as they would be outside the prison, given that the government pays for their accommodation, bills, food, medical, etc.
  - sneak 4y ago
    There is no reason that the minumum wage should not apply. Otherwise, you get institutionalized slavery, like we have now and is documented in this article.
    - okasaki 4y ago
      But isn't prison special and exempt from our distaste against slavery? How could it ever not be akin to slavery even if they were paid?
      - monniez 4y ago
        According to the article there are not enough jobs to go around, so you are not forced to do a job. However, if you do take a job, you should be paid for it, like everybody else. This is important to counter prisons for profit schemes as well as improving the wellbeing of the prisoners.
exogeny 4y ago
That's so fucked. Straight up slave labor in almost all of the cases.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  It's almost like punishment, right?
  - ss2003 4y ago
    Well it's certainly not going to reform them.
  - d4mi3n 4y ago
    This comes up a lot and comes down to the fact that we overload the concept of a prison sentence with both punishment and reform. Sadly, they are typically not conducive to each other. Recidivism rates in the US are terrible because we have very little focus on reform despite the lip service it receives. The thing that makes people emotionally happy is to punish wrongdoers, and while punishment has its place as a disincentive it does not provide a good framework for reform--none of the causes of the crime being punished are addressed and the prisoners are often in worse situations coming out of prison than they were going in. At the end of the day, if we want punishment we shouldn't expect much in the way of reform.
    - bruce511 4y ago
      >> At the end of the day, if we want punishment we shouldn't expect much in the way of reform. I completely agree. Equally if you focus on reform, as some European countries do - by growing the person's self-esteem, ups killing and training, treating them like a human, and fostering good social skills - you need an environment that doesn't appear to be particularly punishing. Of course there are also different reasons for being in prison in the first place. Drug offenses (should they be classified as prisoners of war?), non violent crimes, violent crimes, sex crimes, mental illness etc. This clouds the issue - if I say "prisons should be hell on earth", because I'm thinking rapists, and you say "prisons should be places of reform" because you're thinking "marijana possession" then we can both be right. Yes, different prisons exist, and some lean rehab, some lean punishment. Some inmates expect to be released in "reasonable time", others are in for life. While prisons could, and definitely should, be better - I would argue that the whole justice system needs overhaul. Its too easy to be sent to prison for minor offences. Sentences are generally too long - they remove hope, and without hope there can be no reform. But equally society is crowded, living together in small space means we need rules, re-offending rates are high, and some folk just don't want to be reformed. In short, it's a complicated question, with no simple one-size-fits-all answer. The current approach seems to be failing on many levels.
koolba 4y ago
> The money I did have, from my job and from before my mom died, they let the people come garnish my account because of court fines. On those stimulus checks, they sent me the $1,200 and the $600. They took all of that. Fuck that. Sending stimulus checks to prisoners is beyond asinine. But stealing stimulus check from prisoners is an entirely new level of evil.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Sending them stimulus checks was not asinine it was humane. The prisoners amd their support systems (if they were lucky enough to have one) were still affected by the pandemic. People got sick, lost jobs, etc. Prices of items that they already pay insane amounts for keep going up. One day we will look back on all of this with shame.
latchkey 4y ago
I know this is kind of off-topic, but I felt that the artwork at the top is amazing. Looked up the artist and he has a ton of other stuff. I found a good interview with him, interesting guy [1]. [1] https://wertn.com/2022/04/max-guther/ https://wertn.com/2022/04/max-guther/
- amelius 4y ago
  Looks like artwork from a game studio. Does he use similar tools?
ddtaylor 4y ago
At the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) I was at the monthly pay for 80% of the inmates (kitchen, etc.) is $5.20 per month. Total.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Please add a comma after "I was at".
akomtu 4y ago
Reading this, I've got the impression that prisons simply want to keep inmates busy 24/7: if all their energy is spent on basic needs, they won't have time for criminal activity. Money there is a meaningless token to facilitate the fiction of economy.
- tyingq 4y ago
  "I got in a fight, and they locked me down in the hole. I’ve been in this hole for more than two years now. You lose your job when you’re here. You sit in the room 24 hours a day. The only time they let us out is to go to the shower. We don’t go outside."
cosmodisk 4y ago
Looks like if you go to prison "with money", even a few hundred bucks/month would take you very far. The same crap in most parts of the world.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

123 points by minhduong243 4y ago

I was incarcerated from Feb 2017 to Jan 2018. Five of those months were spent in Edgecombe County Jail, six months in Albemarle District Jail, and a few nights in Wake County Jail (downtown location, not Hammond Road). The reason for moving around is because I was a Federal detainee. The Federal government contracts with various local jails for housing prior to being transferred to a permanent facility post-sentencing, release, or deportation. In the three locations I named, there are limited opportunities for State inmates to work, and none for Federal ones. Despite this, people found ways to earn an income. The article touched on some of those ways, but many went unmentioned. Here are hustles that I have firsthand knowledge of: Bookie, football pool: I inherited this game from Jakym Tibbs in Albemarle. The way it worked is that players would pay a $1-equivalent commissary item in exchange for an entry slip. On the slip they would select the winning teams from each Sunday NFL matchup, and an exact total score from a specific matchup as a tiebreaker. I collected the slips and commissary, and then recorded it onto a master sheet. I would take a cut of the prize pool. It was practically no income, just for some Sunday fun. Tattooist, stick and poke: Ink can be created from soot or sourced from a flex-pen[0] and a staple or other small piece of metal will serve as a needle. Sell tattoos. Tattooist, tattoo gun. Create a tattoo gun using a motor from a beard trimmer, a toothbrush, and a straightened and sharpened spring from an illicit ballpoint pen. This tool allows for much larger and more lucrative works, but is harder to conceal. Sell tattoos. Vinter: Prison wine is called "Buck" in the North Carolina system. Buck is made by combining some bread, fruits, and a generous helping of sugar procured via Trustees. For small batches of Buck you can ferment it in individual bottles. For larger batches, double up a couple of clean garbage bags. You can make gallons of Buck this way, and then distribute it into bottles after it has finished fermenting. Sell the resulting product. Pharmacist: Drugs can be smuggled into a jail via a corrupt guard, an inmate[1] entering from the street, or the mail. As for the mail, Suboxone strips are small enough to conceal in a letter. Practically anything else can be obtained by way of guards or inmates from outside. For rolling papers they would impregnate normal paper with a coffee mixture and then dry that out and use it for smoking marijuana. Obtain drugs and sell them for a markup. Porn Merchant: Pornography is prohibited and so there is a market for it. You can rent or sell single pornographic images or an entire magazine of it. Tailor: In Edgecombe the dress code was lax, and destruction of jumpsuits was not punished. Jumpsuits can be modified into a two-piece outfit, which allows for better range of motion. This makes your outfit more comfortable and is advantageous in fights. Obtain a razor or other sharpened blade and cut a jumpsuit in half at the waist. Cut vertical slits around the top of the shorts/pants and then run a string through those slits to act as a belt. Charge for this service. Poker Dealer/Player: Poker chips were created by ripping up a deck of cards. The dealer took a percentage of the buy-in, and also played at the table. Cheating is met with violence. Spades Player: You and a partner learn how to play Spades and go try your hand at the table. The buy-in to a game of Spades was a $1-equivalent commissary item. Some people would play this for 5+ hours a day, round after round, back to back to back, without speaking a word. You also had thieves and strong arm robbers. If someone stole from you then you would have to meet it with violence, "check off" (get yourself transferred out of the unit), or become a target of increased predation. I think I've basically covered everything that I encountered as far as money-making goes. The cooking, haircutting, and laundry side-hustles basically worked as described in the article. Edit: Thought of some more! Artist, weaver, and hair braiding. The weaver created and sold little bracelets with designs on them. The artists took commissions, and the braiders did hair. [0] Pen in a flexible, translucent rubber casing. See Shomer-Tec Prison Pen. While you could make the barrel wide enough to comfortably write with, the ballpoint tips on these are completely worthless. [1] In the prisons you have green-clothes and brown-clothes, low and high security. I am told that some in green-clothes are eligible for employment in state services outside of the facility. Groundskeeping at the state ferry system, for example. During your work detail you can collect a parcel of contraband and then smuggle it back into the facility. It is then sold.

nighthawk454 4y ago
Fascinating, thank you for sharing and in such detail
- garrettgrimsley 4y ago
  Welcome! Incarcerated life is like an entirely different universe, to the point that people on the inside refer to life outside as "out there in the world." Experiencing it was very interesting in addition to horrifying.
spoonjim 4y ago
Yikes. This is why I support only under 30 days or life without parole incarceration, other punishments should be Singapore-style caning. I don’t think I should have to live next to people who lived in a place like what you describe.
- Clent 4y ago
  Physical punishment is cruel at any level. When does it become ok to intentionally harm another creature? Why is 'they don't understand' applicable to animals that are not also humans, we are judged by those of us we treated the poorliest. Much could be resolved by attacking the lack of goal based outcomes from the criminal system. Perhaps influenced by punishment culture in American. Most state funded institutions are incentivized to produce good outcomes or lose control of their funding and eventually employment. The same should apply to the prison system. Shut them down, reorganize. Repeat until we achieve desired affected. America has become a no nothing culture. Watch agape, engagingly discuss, wait until next distraction. There is no problem America cannot ignore if they work together. Paradoxically, there is no problem America can work together to solve.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    What's your proposal for dealing with rapists/murderers/child abusers/etc? If it doesn't involve shooting them to Neptune, explain how you will keep them permanently out of my life.

idoh 4y ago

What a fascinating and sad article. $0.10 an hour is an unreal, unreasonably low rate. And the lack of necessities like soap is startling.

14 4y ago
I wouldn’t treat my enemies that bad. And we spend a lot of time judging other countries and how they treat prisoners. What prisoners need is a prisoners union but prisons have built protections into preventing communications between jails. If all prisoners went on strike at the same time many things that rely on slave labour would come to a quick stop and the slave labour money machine would come to a crashing stop.
okasaki 4y ago
How much should they be paid? Presumably not as much as they would be outside the prison, given that the government pays for their accommodation, bills, food, medical, etc.
- sneak 4y ago
  There is no reason that the minumum wage should not apply. Otherwise, you get institutionalized slavery, like we have now and is documented in this article.
  - okasaki 4y ago
    But isn't prison special and exempt from our distaste against slavery? How could it ever not be akin to slavery even if they were paid?
    - monniez 4y ago
      According to the article there are not enough jobs to go around, so you are not forced to do a job. However, if you do take a job, you should be paid for it, like everybody else. This is important to counter prisons for profit schemes as well as improving the wellbeing of the prisoners.

exogeny 4y ago

That's so fucked. Straight up slave labor in almost all of the cases.

readthenotes1 4y ago
It's almost like punishment, right?
- ss2003 4y ago
  Well it's certainly not going to reform them.
- d4mi3n 4y ago
  This comes up a lot and comes down to the fact that we overload the concept of a prison sentence with both punishment and reform. Sadly, they are typically not conducive to each other. Recidivism rates in the US are terrible because we have very little focus on reform despite the lip service it receives. The thing that makes people emotionally happy is to punish wrongdoers, and while punishment has its place as a disincentive it does not provide a good framework for reform--none of the causes of the crime being punished are addressed and the prisoners are often in worse situations coming out of prison than they were going in. At the end of the day, if we want punishment we shouldn't expect much in the way of reform.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    >> At the end of the day, if we want punishment we shouldn't expect much in the way of reform. I completely agree. Equally if you focus on reform, as some European countries do - by growing the person's self-esteem, ups killing and training, treating them like a human, and fostering good social skills - you need an environment that doesn't appear to be particularly punishing. Of course there are also different reasons for being in prison in the first place. Drug offenses (should they be classified as prisoners of war?), non violent crimes, violent crimes, sex crimes, mental illness etc. This clouds the issue - if I say "prisons should be hell on earth", because I'm thinking rapists, and you say "prisons should be places of reform" because you're thinking "marijana possession" then we can both be right. Yes, different prisons exist, and some lean rehab, some lean punishment. Some inmates expect to be released in "reasonable time", others are in for life. While prisons could, and definitely should, be better - I would argue that the whole justice system needs overhaul. Its too easy to be sent to prison for minor offences. Sentences are generally too long - they remove hope, and without hope there can be no reform. But equally society is crowded, living together in small space means we need rules, re-offending rates are high, and some folk just don't want to be reformed. In short, it's a complicated question, with no simple one-size-fits-all answer. The current approach seems to be failing on many levels.

koolba 4y ago

> The money I did have, from my job and from before my mom died, they let the people come garnish my account because of court fines. On those stimulus checks, they sent me the $1,200 and the $600. They took all of that. Fuck that. Sending stimulus checks to prisoners is beyond asinine. But stealing stimulus check from prisoners is an entirely new level of evil.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
effingwewt 4y ago
Sending them stimulus checks was not asinine it was humane. The prisoners amd their support systems (if they were lucky enough to have one) were still affected by the pandemic. People got sick, lost jobs, etc. Prices of items that they already pay insane amounts for keep going up. One day we will look back on all of this with shame.

latchkey 4y ago

I know this is kind of off-topic, but I felt that the artwork at the top is amazing. Looked up the artist and he has a ton of other stuff. I found a good interview with him, interesting guy [1]. [1] https://wertn.com/2022/04/max-guther/ https://wertn.com/2022/04/max-guther/

amelius 4y ago
Looks like artwork from a game studio. Does he use similar tools?

ddtaylor 4y ago

At the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) I was at the monthly pay for 80% of the inmates (kitchen, etc.) is $5.20 per month. Total.

imtringued 4y ago
Please add a comma after "I was at".

akomtu 4y ago

Reading this, I've got the impression that prisons simply want to keep inmates busy 24/7: if all their energy is spent on basic needs, they won't have time for criminal activity. Money there is a meaningless token to facilitate the fiction of economy.

tyingq 4y ago
"I got in a fight, and they locked me down in the hole. I’ve been in this hole for more than two years now. You lose your job when you’re here. You sit in the room 24 hours a day. The only time they let us out is to go to the shower. We don’t go outside."

cosmodisk 4y ago

Looks like if you go to prison "with money", even a few hundred bucks/month would take you very far. The same crap in most parts of the world.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]