15. PRISON INDUSTRY
Many inmates stay busy while in prison. True, some inmates try to sleep their sentence away, but others profit by working and charging for their handiwork. Most of the prison industry is contrary to prison rules. Some are even illegal.
Weapons
A prison is a dangerous place. There are fights and stabbings. One never knows where danger is lurking. You may be jumped as you walk back from chow or as you are on the exercise field. There is a chance you will be beaten in the dorm or even in your cell. People are beaten up in the shower. Every place in prison is a potential spot to be beaten or stabbed.
The control room should always have at least one guard. Even then, you can still be stabbed to death before the guard can ever get to you. It takes just a split second to have your neck slit. Sometimes, the inmates work in packs standing around the one being beaten so the guards cannot see what is happening. One inmate hurting another inmate is easy to do and often goes unpunished because the victim is afraid to talk. The number of inmates who are injured by slipping in the shower is astounding.
Many consider access to weapons a matter of survival. As a result, most inmates feel it is their right to carry a weapon to protect themselves. Shivs (homemade knives) are considered a necessity by most inmates. Some enterprising inmate figures out how to fulfill a need where there is a need. While at the same time they make a tidy profit.
Shivs are made from almost anything. For example, the end of a toothbrush can be sharpened by rubbing it on the concrete block wall. Likewise, the blades from razors can be embedded in pencils, sticks, etc.
Larger blades can be made from stolen metal. While prison guards supposedly watch inmates working in the shop, they often do not see inmates slipping a piece of metal out to take back to the dorm or cell house. I have seen knives made as large as 13 inches from these stolen pieces of metal.
A chicken bone is one of the stranger items used to make a shiv. Once per month, the dining hall serves oven-fried chicken leg quarters. Guards try to be sure no bone is taken out of the hall. However, inmates can be slick, and often a bone or two is carried out. They sharpen the leg or thigh bone and use it as a weapon. Trust me, a stab from a chicken bone can be deadly when used on the right part of the body. Another weapon, and interestingly enough, is the lockerâs lock.
Every inmate is issued a Master lock to secure their locker from thieves. Yes, believe it or not, there are thieves in prison. lol A hard metal lock can be placed inside a sock and swung at someone. A hit on the head with a lock can be hard enough to cause a concussion or worse.
Tattooing
Prison tats are a big business. Some people had done tattooing on the outside, while others picked the skill up on the inside. They learned how to make the ink, make the tattoo machine, and do the work. Some of the tatts were quite attractive and elaborate. Others were amateurish.
Tattoos are a big business, but the sterileness of the needles is to be desired. So they sort of sterilize the needles, but there is still a great chance of transmitting diseases.
Clothing
Regulation prison garb is what the inmate is supposed to wear. However, the powers that be are not picky about what inmates wear in the cell houses or dorms. As a result, homemade shorts flow in abundance in prison. They are comfortable to wear and are not as hot as the inmateâs uniform pants.
Remember, the dorms are basically large warehouses that are stocked with inmates. So, the commodities on the shelves (bunks) are inmates making revenue for the state. As with any large warehouse, the dorms and cell houses are extremely hot in the summer and cold during the winter.
Drugs/Smokes
There are three things that inmates must have for peace to reign in prisons. These three things are essential for calm interactions among different groups and between inmates and guards. While most people would think good food is one of the three, in reality, it is not. It would be nice, but as long as inmates have supplemental food (from the commissary), they are OK.
The three essentials for a calm prison are illegal drugs, smokes, and phones. Unfortunately, all three of them are easy to obtain in prisons. Guards look the other way and overlook the contraband to maintain peace. They know the inmates have contraband, but they also know if they were to take all the contraband away, they would have riots on their hands.
Phones are vital because they are the lifeline to the outside world. Unfortunately, as will be seen in the next section, phones are used for all forms of illegal activity. Phones allow kingpins to continue running their criminal enterprises on the outside.
Phones also allow inmates to set up phone drops and drug and smoke drops. In addition, inmates can contact outside suppliers to order all types of drugs, cigarettes, and phones. These items are thrown over the prison fence, or the supplier will meet outside the fence to deliver the contraband.
Yes, some inmates know how to cut through the fence to get their hands on drugs, etc. I think if you break out of prison, keep running. However, the profit to be made in prison is too much of a lure for some inmates. They slip outside the wall and then come back in to work as a supplier on the inside.
Phone Scams
One of the uses for the phones by inmates really infuriated me. Most of the contraband phones were used to sell or rent to other inmates allowing them to talk to their loved ones outside. Some were used to harass people on the outside. Others were used to sweet-talk women and make them feel sorry for the inmate. Then the inmate would ask for money and often get it.
But the scam that really bugged the daylights out of me was the guys who pretended to be an FBI agent. They would call people on the sexual offender registry and explain that they had an arrest warrant for them. They would explain that they could only avoid serving the warrant the following morning if the offender provided $338 (or whatever they wanted) before the morning. The offender would buy a pay-out card and give the âagentâ the numbers. I knew one guy who made a couple thousand each week running this scam. He also had many other inmates under him, bringing in more money.
Inmates are experts at manipulating others. For example, they pretend to be in love to have their love interest help them out buy what they need in prison. I knew one guy that ran a scam on a lady in her 70s. He sweet-talked her and promised he was going to marry her when he got out. She had never married and fell in love with the idea of being in love. Instead, he was controlling and conniving. He talked her into sending him money for his surgery.
The most the prison charges is $5 per procedure. He claimed he had heart surgery that did not cost him anything. If an inmate has no money in their account, they are not charged anything for medical care. He talked her into sending him $75 for the surgery. He did many things like that. He told her many things that were easy to show to be false, but the elderly lady did not know she was being scammed.
Laundry
 Finally, a legit prison industry. Each dorm has someone who takes all the clothes to the prison laundry and washes them. They wash everyoneâs clothes together. The clothes of inmates who stay in the cell house/dorm all day are washed along with the dirty clothes of those who do road work for the local city.
You may have a new, perfectly white tee-shirt that you send to the laundry. By the time it comes back later that day, it is dingy. Within a couple of weeks, it will be basically brown. The dirt and grime from other inmatesâ uniforms are transferred to your new clothes.
Many of these laundry men will wash your laundry separately for a Ramen noodle soup per piece of clothing. Unfortunately, that can get expensive, and only the well-to-do can usually afford to have their clothes washed that way. I was blessed to have a laundry man who liked me and did all my laundry for 4 Ramens per week.Â
Some of the guys would buy bleach (not allowed) and wash their own clothes. Then, they would take the mop bucket and turn it into a washtub. Their clothes looked clean because of the amount of bleach they used.
Food from the Kitchen
The last industry I want to talk about is the black-market food industry. Kitchen workers had the perfect job to steal condiments, spices, onions, peppers, and other foodstuffs from the kitchen. What they were able to smuggle out of the kitchen was sold for a nice profit.
The food served by the prison did not have condiments because they were all stolen. The inmates would steal and then sell the spices to other inmates. Only the inmates that bought condiments had any for their food. There were a few who would share what they had bought.
The kitchen inmate would take the foodstuffs back to his cell house/dorm and package them for sale. Then, he would take a plastic disposable glove and cut the fingers off. He would then fill the fingers with the spice, condiment, whatever, and sell it. The price quoted was per finger.
Some kitchen inmates would cook up many âmeatâ patties, extra sloppy Joe, sausage, etc., and take it to sell. So why they did not get caught is only partly a mystery. Many kitchen stewards (those who worked for the food service company) would wink at the theft. They thought of it as a way to pay the inmates for their hard work in the kitchen. Some just did not care. However, some guards and stewards who were really strict, and on the days they worked, no food left the kitchen with the inmates.
Pay for Labor
This idea of allowing inmates who work in the kitchen to take food and condiments out to sell to other inmates as a form of pay raises a good question. Is renting/leasing inmates out to local governments constitutional? Can prisons put inmates to work without compensation?
This issue has existed since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
For example, California saves up to $100 million a year, according to state corrections spokesman Bill Sessa, by recruiting incarcerated people as volunteer firefighters.[1]
The minimum estimated annual value of incarcerated labor from U.S. prisons and jails is $2 billion, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative. And as NPR reported in July, companies like Walmart, AT&T, Whole Foods and Victoria's Secret have used incarcerated populations for their business operations.[2]
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942413221/democrats-push-abolition-amendment-to-fully-erase-slavery-from-u-s-constitution[3]
Goodwin, and others who have studied the issue, link the âpunishment clauseâ of the Thirteenth Amendment to the growth of prison labor and the rise of mass incarceration and private, for-profit prisons. In the era of mass incarceration, convict labor has gone national without losing its racial character. âThe modern masks of slavery: mass incarceration, pay to play probation, modern chain gangs, and the exploitation of cheap labor emerge along the color line just as Antebellum slavery was anchored in the same,â she wrote.[4]
Check out:
https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/the-war-over-the-13th-amendment-and-modern-day-slavery/Â Â This is too long for this book but gives good food for thoughts.
Also, check out:
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1176&context=wmborj
This book is not long enough to give an exhaustive discussion on renting inmates out to labor for local government or companies. However, I believe that sending inmates out to work for governments and companies to save them money is a form of slavery since the inmates do not get paid minimum wage. In most states, they are paid nothing.
[1] https://www.history.com/news/13th-amendment-slavery-loophole-jim-crow-prisons accessed 9/21/21
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942413221/democrats-push-abolition-amendment-to-fully-erase-slavery-from-u-s-constitution accesed 9/21/21
[3] https://www.history.com/news/13th-amendment-slavery-loophole-jim-crow-prisons accessed 9/21/21
[4] https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/the-war-over-the-13th-amendment-and-modern-day-slavery/ accessed 9/21/21
