I really shouldn’t be surprised that, as much as I like the reporting in The Washington Post, the should also succumb to misleading sensationalism when it comes to reporting on the prison system. I clicked on their clickbait headline “Federal prisoners hold $100 million in government-run accounts, shielded from some criminal scrutiny and debt collection” and I was naively surprised to find that Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Devlin Barrett is just as much a creature of media hype as everyone else. I’m sure he didn’t write the headline, likelike someone SEO optimized it rather clumsily, but it’s a shame to start out in such a misleading way. So what if federal prisoners hole $100 MIllion on their accounts? That averages out to less that $700 per inmate. (The Post uses a classic, propagandistic, lowball and misleading number for the number of inmates in the federal prison system) Let me tell you from an insider’s perspective that even having $700 on your account is doing very well for a federal prisoner. That’s upper middle class territory. Most people have far less than that, usually someplace in the $0-100 range. If you want to check it out, head down to the prison commissary on shopping day and see who is economizing or talking about how he is now specing all his money for the rest of the month. It’s far more common than the people who have 6 figures. After all, the maximum you are allowed to spend at commissary is $360 a month; you can spend far more than that on paying for telephone calls and internet connections to communicate with the outside world. Also remember that the average inmate makes about $0.12 an hour while the big earners make maybe $1.25 an hour.
It’s also true that the prison can’t actually force an inmate to pay down their outside debts, fines, or obligations in a way that might seem timely to a Washington reporter. But those who refuse to pay at a rate determined by BOP officials also are ineligible for those lucrative prisons jobs I just mentioned (this is the primary “punishment” the article mentions, along with restricted commissary spending). So think about the unspoken here: What Barrett neglects to point out is that inmates who do work hard at low-paying jobs because they do not have tons of money on their books are the ones who are more likely to be broke two weeks into the month. Once you are broke, you are more likely to develop some sort of hustle that likely runs afoul of prison rules because, of course, all side hustle are forbidden under prison rules. It’s not that they don’t exist, it’s just that officials look the other way because the entire economy and social fabric of federal prisons are dependent on them. And you don’t really have to bribe officials to look the other way at most innocuous hustles; they are simply accepted as part of the fabric of prison. Hell, you don’t have to bribe the average guard to look the other way on highly illegal hustles; often they won’t interfere with them simply because doing so would be interfering with the fellow guards’ side hustles and that would be a violation of the blue brotherhood. But let’s just say that you have a hustle personalizing plastic cups for other inmates. Not only do you sometimes have to keep that under wraps from certain “scrupulous” guards, but you are also almost entirely unlikely to get paid for that hustle by receiving money on your account. Prison economy doesn’t work like that. Typically you will be paid either in postage stamps, which are the dollar bill of the federal prison system, or in products from commissary. The stamps themselves are not worth their face value. 20 stamps is equivalent to $7. If you have in your possession $700 dollars worth of stamps, you will be sent to solitary should a guard discover them in your locker, the official policy being a maximum of 60 stamps in your possession at a time. They will also confiscate the stamps and, such a nice twist, use them to pay off their snitches. So what the article just gets wrong as a basic premise is that the entire prison economy functions primarily via the black market. Even if everything were above board, try this word problem: How much money would an inmate spending $360 a month on commissary and $100 on phone and internet need if he were serving a 20 year sentence. That’s right, over $100,000. When we put number in context, they just don’t seem so click-baity.
When the article cites a former US Marshal as saying that they have “discovered the source of deposits in some cases to be from ongoing criminal conduct,” the reporting rises to the level of the No Shit Sherlock Prize. Do people still actually think that putting people in prison stops criminal enterprises? The prison has nothing to do with it; it’s wholly up to the person. Prison is, as you can simply and logically deduce, a hotbed of criminal activity. Many people in prison know very little other than criminal enterprise and literally cannot envision a world in which they aren’t engaged in it. Working a 12 cent an hour job under rather abusive conditions doesn’t help them envision alternatives. As I have written about before, no less a personage than Henry Ford recognized this a century ago. I’m not sure why we still operate on a premise Ford saw as faulty back in the day.
As for the failed debt collection attempts that the article bemoans, Bennett and the WAPO editors really have to understand that the glib prisoner’s response is going to be the most accurate: “What are they going to do, put me in prison if I don’t pay?” Should you want to see how foolish the incarcerated debtor scenario is, I can recommend an excellent book: Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers from 1836. The great thing about that book is that it shows how debtors with more means can use their money and their connections to live a lifestyle far swankier than the average prisoner. They just have to know how to spread the money around properly amongst other inmates and prison staff. The major difference between Dickens and this article, however, is that Dickens recognizes absurdity and satirizes it when he sees it. I guess acuity and irony have lost something over the past 185 years.
Whatever the Bureau of Prisons says, it has the absolute ability to monitor transactions that enter and leave an inmate’s trust fund account. Where we all need a bit more transparency is on the BILLIONS of dollars that are moving in and out of the Bureau of Prisons accounts. Yes, prisoners can have the BOP issue checks drawn on their accounts, but those checks have to be approved by prison officials and require paperwork (called a BP 199). In fact, BOP officials often pressure, cajole, and threaten inmates to pay more towards their financial obligations. Moreover, many inmates do so eagerly. The rub is that this is kind of like income taxes, the wealthy can get away with paying less because they are wealthy, while the average and the poor are stuck being subject to the power of the state. It’s not really a prison issue, but it certainly is the American Way. I’m at a bit of a loss to discern what, in the end, the actual premise of this article is. That some inmates have shady money dealings? That people don’t like to pay what they are told by courts that they owe? These insights might qualify one from a degree from, as one of my esteemed Ivy League colleagues used to say, The University of Who the Fuck Didn’t Know That. Certainly there is no thought given to the greater problem at hand: that all life events can be monetized or that people can be made “whole” by cash payments. But that’s a question that would be un-American even to ask. After all, we are a country who thought that a faux billionaire would make a good president.
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