The Cost of Living in Prison

In prison, you are not supplied with all your needs by the Department of Corrections (DOC). You are provided the bare necessities when you are admitted, but after that you are on your own. You need to purchase socks, tee shirts, shoes. You need to supplement the three prison meals with soups and snacks. You need to purchase personal hygiene products. You can only do this through the prison commissary, run under a contract with a company called Keefe Group. Your loved ones on the outside can only purchase items for you through the prison commissary. And the commissary is expensive, more expensive than on the outside.

We can go to the supermarket and purchase a packet of ramen noodle soup for less than fifty cents. In prison you pay close to a dollar. Instant coffee is $6.31 for 4 ounces. Generally speaking, you can count on paying twice as much for something from the prison commissary than you would pay out of prison.

Then there are phone calls and video visits, through a company called Global Tel Link. Keeping ties to loved ones while doing time is crucial to one’s success and mental health. DOC provides one free five-minute call a week, hardly enough to nurture relationships. Any other calls you want to make costs $1.50 for a 20-minute call. Video visits will run you $3.50 for 15 minutes and $7 for a half hour.

And where do you get that money?

If you’re lucky, you can get a prison job. Not everyone can have one, there aren’t enough to go around. The bottom-of-the-line jobs, like cleaning and wheelchair-pushing, pay $1 a day. Kitchen work pays a dollar a shift, and you are expected to work three four-hour shifts per day. If you are a cook or a baker, you get $7 per day. So do law librarians and peer mentors.

You can quickly see that for some people, two packages of ramen noodles will cost a day’s wage. If you’re a higher earner, 4 ounces of instant coffee is a day’s wage.

If you’re lucky enough to have loved ones on the outside that are willing and able to help, they can put money on your commissary account. Not everyone has this. And if they do, chances are the loved ones are suffering from the lack of income from the incarcerated person. They may be struggling themselves.

Some legislators are attempting to address this problem with H.294. The bill reads, in part, “this bill proposes to ensure that incarcerated individuals are provided communications services at no expense….  to require the Department of Corrections to evaluate its contracts with Global Tel Link Corporation and the Keefe Group… (and) also proposes to require that incarcerated individuals receive at least federal minimum wage.”

This bill is currently in the House Corrections and Institutions Committee. If you feel this bill should pass, please call your state representative and ask that person to support H.294.

Find your state legislature’s contact information here.