Stealing For a Living

Unless you have a medical excuse, you are required to have a job in prison. If you refuse to work, you are punished. (I am at a loss of how this differs from slavery.) With 1900 – 2100 inmates on the compound at any one time, the compensation for work is even less here than in Texas. I’ve been working in the dining room for two weeks now, and my fellow inmates tell me that you can expect to make about eighteen bucks a month, even if you’ve been here a year or more. Again, I’m reminded of slavery.

How can you support yourself on eighteen dollars a month? You can’t. A 15-minute phone call costs $3.45 (unless you got Jacked ^_^), email is five cents a minute, Forever Stamps cost $8.80 a book, and don’t get me started on talking about commissary prices. If you have no assistance from the outside, you’re sunk. Unless . . .

If you work in food service, you can steal anything and everything you can get your hands on, and the cops know it. It’s kind of understood that if you are working in the cafeteria, you are going to become a thief. It’s surreal looking at all the food that gets “moved” out of the cafeteria while a meal is being served. It’s a wonder that any food is left to serve at all! A lot of workers hand off their ill-gotten loot to a partner, who came in for the meal, to smuggle out of the cafeteria. What gets stolen? Raw eggs, milk, fruit, loaves of bread, meat, cakes and pastries, cereal, oatmeal, cheese, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes – even cleaning supplies get snatched.

Inmates quickly learn to become master thieves in the kitchen. I’ve seen an inmate take off his shirt, fold up and tie a plastic trash bag around his waist, and smuggle out NINETY raw eggs inside it. Is this the government’s idea of rehabilitation by learning a new trade skill?

Back in Texas, the kitchen was a political hot zone and only members of certain gangs got to steal, but here things are a bit more altruistic. Here, anyone can steal as long as they don’t try to nab something that someone else has already stolen and hidden elsewhere in the kitchen. For certain items (like bell peppers and onions), you will actually need to pay an inmate for the right to loot them. Some areas are sealed off from the rest of the kitchen, with only a few inmates working in them (basically anywhere there’s cold storage). You will need their cooperation if you want what’s inside those areas. Grease their palms with postage stamps, and they will give you whatever you want.

Paying to steal is kind of exploitive, but that’s how the game is played here. As long as you can get the goods out of the kitchen, though, you’ll end up doubling your money. I’ll list some prices of goods at black market prices:

1 stamp = 25 cents

ITEM	PRICE
2 raw eggs	1 stamp
a bread bag filled with cornflakes	4 stamps
1 loaf of bread	6 stamps
5-pound bag of spaghetti	20 stamps
1 banana	2 stamps
1 pound of garlic powder	10 stamps
1 onion / tomato / bell pepper	4 stamps
a bread bag filled with sugar	10 stamps
16-ounce bottle of concentrated coffee in syrup form	4 stamps

Once you have some stamps, you can trade them away for inmate-made goods like handmade greeting cards or leather wallets made in hobbycraft, or you can trade them for commissary items. Having a book of stamps in prison is like owning a Visa card in the outside world – It’s accepted everywhere you want to be. Wait, that’s a bad analogy since I DON’T want to be here, but still it’s kinda accurate. Sort of.

Do the cops ever try to thwart thievery? Yes, but there is so much of it, they’ll never be able to stop it all. There are cops who do pat searches on inmates leaving the cafeteria; if you have an obvious bulge in your coat, you can expect to be stopped. However, there are some officers who see the need for inmates to make a little money, and they will turn a blind eye to your illicit activities. Just remember one thing: Never cross them. If you don’t do your job in the kitchen or if you act belligerent to the few cops that show you mercy, you can expect to never be able to sneak anything out again. You’ll have a target painted on your back whenever you show up for work.

Bottom Line: In no way, shape or form does prison mirror the civilized world. Being locked up is slow torture by boredom and deprivation, so it’s important to be able to afford the few luxuries you’re allowed to have. Inmates that have no outside support, unfortunately, will be forced to lie, cheat and steal just to have a little money to spend. It’s sad, but that’s the way of life inside prison walls.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: I was confused by the prison “currency exchange,” so I asked Joe about it when I spoke with him by phone. Joe said that postage stamps are “inmate money,” and that there are postage stamps being traded around prison that have been around for decades. You can trade 25-cent stamps, 37-cent stamps, or whatever. You cannot BUY inmate money, you can only TRADE for it. ALL stamps are considered to be worth 25 cents. That is why an inmate does NOT want to trade any precious Forever Stamps for which he just paid 44 cents apiece. An inmate must trade an item or service in order to get inmate money.]