Welcome to Hell Prison Currency — Soup Economics

Welcome to Hell
Prison Currency — Soup Economics

By D.P. O’Keefe

Money is considered contraband in prison. And even if you had any, you really can’t buy anything with it. As a result, prison is a credit commodities-based socioeconomic system in which Ramen Noodle soup is the unit of currency. In short, soup is coin.

Two soups will get you a haircut. One soup to the laundry man might get your clothes extra dry. Five soups are what it costs when you lose a game of spades. Soup has all the makings for a good currency—it has worth, it is transportable, and it can’t be counterfeited.

Prison currency used to be cigarettes back when we weren’t a nation of neurotics, but they took them away from us. So instead of a sleek, fast-moving prison population, we are a society of slow, overweight carbohydrate junkies.

There are other units of currency, but none are as "liquid" as soup. Deodorant, toothpaste, soap and stamped envelopes are also traded. But the trouble with these is that they require the purchaser to be in need of those commodities at the time of trade. And if you think of the average inmate as a Cro-Magnon, you’ll understand that things you can’t fit in your mouth are too difficult to work into the trading schema.

Soup is it.

Trading items is a risky business, and as one might expect, prison has some not-so-trustworthy clientele. Trades on credit are dangerous, especially if your customer is a 6’-10" gorilla who may renege on your little soup deal just because—well, because he can. As a result, trading on credit comes with a hefty interest rate: 2 for 1, or 100% interest. For every soup you lend, you get two back—presumably on the next weekly commissary day.

Without trying to give the Ramen Noodle people any free advertising, their product sells faster than lightning in the prison system because it is delicious, filling, and simple enough for a Cro-Magnon to make.

Rough estimates: I’ll guess that in our prison alone, three thousand soups move through in a week. Multiply that by the number of correctional facilities in the state, and you’re talking about a lot of noodles.

It’s all very interesting. In fact, if I had been given this as a case study in economics class, I may have passed.

On the morning commissary is delivered, the day room of the cellblock is transformed into the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Products change hands all day—through recreation, through meals, and it spills over into the next day.

As a consumer-type in here, I am a black hole of stationery. I buy envelopes, paper and pens by the bag. By buying them from prisoners using soup or candy, I could actually pay less for them than if I’d bought them from commissary. And since everyone knows I use a ton of stationery, I’m kept aware of good deals on the stuff.

Commissary items can also be used to purchase contraband. (And, in case you’re interested, single cigarettes go for $5.) But since this prison is a maximum security facility, not much comes in via the underground contraband railroad. I haven’t seen a cigarette in almost a year. And I’ve only heard rumors of drugs and alcohol. They can be had; I’m just not on that level of disobedience.

Soup, however, is not only legal, it’s almost an over-the-counter trade. Technically you can get hit with a disciplinary ticket for "bartering," but soup is harmless and is so cheap it rarely causes violence if a trade goes badly. And trades do go badly. There are soup deadbeats.

Since trading can lead to violence, I don’t like to do it. But a sweet deal on some soft-feel rolling writer pens is worth a potential black eye, and I’d take a blow to the body for a "2 for 1" deal on a large number of stamped envelopes.

I buy the commissary maximum quantity of soup every week. If I ate that many, I’d be on Jerry Springer being filmed in a private trailer, and I’d have to wash myself with a rag on a stick.

No, I don’t eat all of them, but I keep a reserve of them. You’ll never know when there may be an unexpected shortage, and that creates a low supply, which makes the price go up—because one line intersects on a chart and it causes the other line to go … oh, forget it. Economics was an 8 a.m. class.

D.P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.