Captive market results in higher prices

Discussing our prison commissary project

• Joseph Darius Jaafari
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  Joseph Darius Jaafari was a staff writer for the PA Post. His work covering crime, the military and LGBTQ issues has been featured in The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced for VICE and The New York Post. He is a native Arizonan and infamous for his love of tacos.

On Wednesday, we published an interactive story on the costs inmates pay for items at jail commissaries, the stores inside correctional facilities that sell inmates food, clothing and electronics.

The products are anything but luxury goods. Most, in fact, are pretty shabby (I mean, they sell cassette and CD-players — if anyone tells you in 2020 that a see-through Walkman is a luxury, please show them the internet).

The inspiration for this story was our prior piece about how county jails are charging exorbitant prices for religious materials (for example, cheap paperback Qurans cost upwards of $25). We wanted to know if other goods were being marked up too.

We looked at county contracts with the two largest companies that provide the items to Pennsylvania jails, Keefe Group and Oasis Management Systems. Those contracts say prices should be similar to what’s charged by retailers on the outside.

Unfortunately, neither company would return our calls to explain how they price their items. So, we tried doing it ourselves. We spoke with inmates, gathered 20 different jail’s commissary menus, and went shopping.

We found that inmates were generally charged higher prices — in some cases 800 percent more — than what they’d pay on the outside. This wasn’t shocking to many of the inmates we talked with. At some point during their jail stays, they said, they all felt taken advantage of.

What was most shocking to us was the cost of feminine hygiene products. Though the majority of jails provide two sanitary napkins per day to female inmates when they request them, getting pads was described as a “hassle” by Rachel Santiago, one of the former inmates we spoke with.

“You’re out of your cell really only a few hours to go get food when it’s served, and you have very little time to go and ask for them,” Santiago said. For the most part, she said, women have to stockpile napkins or, as she did, rely on family to help pay for tampons or pads.

But if women don’t have financial resources, they have to create their own pads or tampons using underwear and toilet paper (which you also have to pay for). Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, who was locked up in Riverside Correctional Facility, told us that she would make her own tampons out of tissue paper.

Pair this with the fact that inmates typically don’t make any money while locked up, and prisoners’ rights activists say that jails are profiting off of poor people.

And they are profiting. Our review of county budgets found that jails across the commonwealth generated millions of dollars in revenue from prison commissaries. That money is used for equipment and other jail costs, and at least one county spends some of the proceeds on reentry programs for ex-inmates.

A common reaction to our stories is that inmates should have to shoulder some of the cost of their incarceration. And multiple wardens we spoke with said the items sold at commissaries are not necessities; the prison, they argue, provides everything inmates need to live.

Many other readers took to social media to argue that prison isn’t meant to be comfortable.

But comfortable and livable are two different things. Prison food is notoriously awful, and the time between meals is a problem for some inmates. Many jails stop meal service in the mid-afternoon. (I’d venture it would be hard for anyone to eat dinner at 4:30 p.m., and then not be able to eat or drink anything but water until breakfast at 4 a.m. the next morning.) For years, inmates in Dauphin County Prison had their dinner served at 2:30 in the afternoon.

So, what’s next? We’ll keep an eye out for any updates on this. But we’d also love to hear your stories and thoughts on this. Do you think it’s right for inmates being charged more for items? Be sure to read the story and let us know in our Listening Post here. — Joseph Darius Jaafari

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