Letter #2: Notes From The Inside
In his second letter from prison, Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez breaks down how a lack of access drives the need for alternative markets to develop.
Hello Reader,
The shadow economy of FPC Morgantown runs on pouches of mackerel. Yes, the fish. Much like any fiat, or precious metal standard there is no intrinsic value to the currency, to the mackerel.
You might be a smart ass thinking to yourself that surely you can eat the mackerel if you wanted and there is some amount of protein that some prison economist has a model for deriving intrinsic value based on caloric density and protein richness. But alas, no.
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Most of the mackerel in circulation is so old that eating it would most certainly result in a visit to the medical station or worse a nasty case of the runs. Trust me when I say the last place you want to have the runs is in a communal toilet block that 100 other guys make use of as well.
So no, the mackerel - also known as Macks - are certainly not for eating. But why mackerel? Why not chicken, salmon, tuna, or like other prisons, stamps? Stamps seem like a more logical choice, they have multiple face value denominations, they are a form of government tender, they have some value on the outside, they are hard to counterfeit, they do not go rancid after time, and in the words of the gentleman I met in the laundry room last night "doggon thangs smell like pussy that gon' rotten".
Before we can get into the reason for "The Mack Standard" at FPC Morgantown let us examine more deeply the grey market forces at play by first understanding what the white market looks like.
Each prisoner has two ways to earn dollars while incarcerated. A friend or family member on the outside can "add money to your books" - This means they deposit a sum of money into your prisoner trust fund account held by the BOP on your behalf.
The other way is by earning the dollars through your prison job. Each person in a Federal prison must have a job. The pay for these jobs range from $0.20 to $1.00 an hour, so needless to say if you're relying on your prison job solely to earn money while inside there is going to need to be some creativity on your part.
What is money actually used for anyway? Where does one spend the money they earn or that friends and family send? Every week there is a designated day that you are allowed to "shop" at the commissary.
You fill out a sheet like you would have found in an old mail order catalog. You mark what item you want and then quantity you want. You then wait in line for over an hour while commissary employees gather the items to be distributed.
Keonne Rodriguez
You can buy all sorts of items to make your stay in prison more comfortable. Your sentence goes much smoother with limited creature comforts on your side.
For example, you can buy what prisoners call "greys" which is a grey sweatshirt and grey sweatpants so that during off hours you can remove your stiff uncomfortable uniform you can change into something more comfortable.
They sell comfortable sneakers so that during recreation time you can wear something other than your heavy and mightily uncomfortable prison issued work boots. The commissary also sells shelf stable food items and snacks.
Of course, the most important shelf stable item they sell are pouches of mackerel. One pouch goes for $1.40 - They used to be a dollar, but that is inflation for you.
There are several other factors of the white market prison economy to be aware of. These factors really drive the grey market in a prison.
The first is each prisoner has a spending limit imposed on them of $360 per month. It isn't too difficult to hit that limit.
A tablet for watching rented movies costs $148, a pair of sneakers $70, a pair of more comfortable work boots $100. A pouch of Chicken $4.00.
You have to be quite strategic about what you buy and when in order to make sure you do not run over your allocated spending amount too early in the month.
The second factor is the artificial limits placed on certain items. For example, you can only buy up to 10 pouches of tuna, or only 1 notebook at a time, or only 20 $0.78 stamps, or 10 $1.00 stamps.
Understanding these factors of artificial limits, inflated prices, and suppressed wages we can begin to discover why a grey market exists in every single prison institution, globally.
There exists two primary needs to prisoners participating in the economy. The ability to overcome the artificial limits imposed by the administration and the ability to earn more than is possible by their prison jobs alone.
Quite frankly, it is the same needs and motivations that were readily apparent and well studied by economists during the reign of the Soviet Union. It is the same factors and motivations that ensure a thriving black and grey market in communist Cuba today.
Whenever these types of limits and restrictions are imposed within the otherwise free and unencumbered market by top down administrators, market participants find a work-around.
That is why the black/grey market is the largest market on earth. It has nothing to do with criminality and everything to do with honest actors being pushed out of the permissioned system.
For the guys who don't have help on the outside, they need to make money on the inside - to supplement the pittance they will earn from their prison job - as such, people run various hustles.
David Z. Morris
Some guys will do your laundry for you, running what essentially amounts to a wash, dry, and fold service with pickup and delivery. This usually runs for 1 mack per garment with some sort of volume discount for large orders.
Some guys are chefs and will prepare hot food to sell right from their cell like some sort of food stall in a third world bazaar.
You can often smell the (frankly delicious) scents radiating from the chefs makeshift kitchen (by the way, there is a sort of symbiotic relationship with the chef and the laundry man. The chef hoards the iron for use in cooking thereby limiting availability to iron your own clothes. The laundry man has the only other iron, so if you want pressed clothing you must engage his services).
The chef will often have runners that take the hot prepared food from cell to cell, collecting packets of mackerel as payment - a sort of prison equivalent of Uber Eats. I am sure they get some commission for this job they perform.
Of course some guys operate on the wrong side of the "law" and sell contraband items such as cell phones, cigarettes, and vapes though I haven't seen this personally yet, I have heard of it within the prison.
Apparently the CO's have heard about it too, as I have experienced two shakedowns (we all are required to leave our living area while a pair of CO's search our cells and everywhere else in the room including air vents and lighting fixtures).
When sports games are on the TV there will be bookmakers and gamblers trying out their luck at a mackerel windfall. Just like on the outside people will do what they have to do to make a buck - or a mack.
For the guys who do have help on the outside and money flowing onto their books they have slightly different motivations.
Some just want to be able to purchase more than the artificial limits allow for. Some are required by their sentence to pay fines or restitution and if they place too much money on their books, the amount they will be required to repay each month will increase, so it makes financial sense for them to keep their books light on cash, and handle only mackerel. Sort of like the way on the outside a businessman will keep their taxable income as low as possible (think Jeff Bezos famously being paid a salary of $1.00).
And some just want to corner the Keebler Chocolate Cookie market (a very popular item, by the way) and become the go to market maker for that product.
L0la L33tz
Whatever the motivations or desires, humans make rational decisions in their own economic self interests, being institutionalized in a prison will not change that. In fact, it will amplify it.
Successful hustler will accrue a large amount of macks while in prison. What do they do with it? You may be wondering how they convert some of that to "real money".
Like every other economy there are currency converters / money changers, and in a prison filled with highly educated white collar criminals, it appears to be a pretty sophisticated operation.
I really haven't participated in the hustle and bustle. I have only been here long enough to shop at commissary once, and I was able to buy everything I needed without breaking the spending limits or item limits. So while I do not know exactly how this part works I have some inkling of an understanding.
From what I gather converting Macks to Dollars works by the buyer of the macks getting an associate on the outside to send the seller of the macks USD via Cash App or by depositing money onto their books directly using something like Western Union.
Like all economies there is some degree of barter that occurs in the prison system.
Some guys refuse to bother with Macks and instead will trade with higher value chicken, or soda, or flaming hot Cheetos, it all depends on who you are dealing with and what they want. Everything is always open to negotiation.
However, barter soon becomes ineffective at scale and currency must be utilized. Much like all economies, what is used as currency is generally worthless - be it paper, metal, or pukka shells - but there is a sort of shared acceptance (or delusion) that the thing we choose represents some sort of value that we all can agree on.
In FPC Morgantown, that is pouches of Mackerel, and they are worth roughly $1.00
As we close this letter let us return to our original question. Why Macks? Why not stamps?
The short answer is I don't know. I have theories but I am not certain. My best theory so far is 1) Most people don't actually want to eat the mackerel, so they stay in circulation longer than something desirable like chicken which more people want to eat; 2) There appears to be no limit on how many mackerel pouches you can buy from the commissary.
From what I gather, stamps are always limited - in fact, most things are - but not mackerel pouches. I think these two observations are what lead my forefather prisoners to found an entire shadow economy based on the Mackerel Standard.
L0la L33tz
As I write this it is December 26th, The day after Christmas. My 8th night as a prisoner. It hasn't taken long to start seeing the way things really work, the way the real economy functions, the way humans will adapt to any situation we find ourselves in.
Just like on the outside there are winners and losers, moguls and paupers, blue collar and white collar.
But unlike the outside, there is a shared camaraderie between the classes and strata of prisoner, an "us versus them" undertone, prisoner versus cop.
Merry Christmas everyone. I wish I was there to celebrate with my family and with you.
Keonne Rodriguez
Write to Keonne:
Keonne Rodriguez
11404-511
FPC Morgantown
FEDERAL PRISON CAMP
P.O. BOX 1000
MORGANTOWN, WV 26507
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