I live in a world where there is no cash, no cards, and no bank accounts. Yet there is money. It might not be a U.S. dollar, a Japanese yen, or a British pound, but it’s still currency. There is product, supply, and plenty of demand. Prison economics are easily one of the most fascinating aspects of being in here. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me coming out, but I’ve always enjoyed studying the flow of money and the meaning behind it. Prison literally has an entire economy that flows system-wide. No matter where you go, there is a currency that is commonly accepted by all inmates, and values are assigned to items available for purchase.

In most prisons, the accepted currency is stamps. That’s right, those things your grandparents had in a drawer with their own little plastic dispenser. The things you never have when you need to send a birthday card. Those stamps are the currency that make the prison economy make sense. While stamps do have a globally-accepted value, their buying power in prison does not mirror the 55 cents they’re assigned on the outside.

The prison allows each inmate to purchase one “flat book” of stamps per week for $11 USD. The second that flat book is purchased, it immediately depreciates in value. While in some institutions the value drop varies, it is always certainly less than what an inmate initially paid. The next drop in value happens when you break a stamp off from the flat book. Where you may have retained up to 40 cents per stamp by keeping the flat book intact, taking just one off now leaves you with what is considered a “book.” A book of stamps is 20 individual stamps, not to be confused with the flat book of fresh off the print stamps. When an inmate goes to purchase items, the cost is stamp-based at the value a stamp has in book form. At my prison, the value given to a single stamp is 30 cents. A stamp that you just purchased for 55 cents is now worth 30 if you want to buy a soda from the Soda Man.

When I arrived here, I couldn’t comprehend how this made sense nor how it was possible. Then I started to watch the flow of the prison economy—how it worked, what variables were involved—and things began to make sense. The people who set the prison’s economy are the Ticket Man, the Store Man, and the Soda Man. And, of course, you have to factor in the price of contraband. Where I am, the Ticket Man, also known as a bookie outside of prison, counts a flat book bet as a 30-stamp bet. The Ticket Man also allows you to add a 5-stamp bet in with a flat book and gives you 25 individual stamps back. The only other place you can sometimes get that value for a flat is by buying contraband. Normally, the guys who have large numbers of books for sale are the same guys who have contraband items. The guys who sell contraband either don’t increase the value for the flat, or maybe they count it as 25 stamps. The Store Man values all stamps at 30 cents each. He takes the cost of the item on commissary and adds a stamp on top. For example, a bag of vanilla cookies that costs 60 cents from the commissary costs three stamps from the Store Man (about 90 cents). 

The obvious question to this economic structure is how in the world do I acquire stamps without needing to pay 55 cents to immediately lose money? This is where the underbelly of prison comes into focus. Institutions that don’t have cellphones prevalently available tend to retain the value of a stamp much better than the ones that do. The reason for this is simple: Cash App. For $100, I can Cash App someone, and they will give me 20 books of stamps. This drops the purchase price to 25 cents per stamp that I can in turn receive a value of 30 cents each for. These individual stamps have been circulating through the prison system for years.

Another way to acquire books is by purchasing commissary. The Store Man runs his entire operation by giving people books of stamps to purchase commissary for him, which he then stocks his store with. He values his books at $6 per book. If you want three books, he gives you a list of $18 worth of commissary, and that’s how you pay him for the books.

The final way to acquire books is by having people from the outside deposit money directly into other inmates’ accounts. With Cash App becoming so common, many guys who deal in contraband accept Cash App directly instead of stamps. Think about it this way: if I wanted to buy a bottle of liquor, instead of giving the guy ten books, I could just Cash App the guy $50.

Stamps can also be earned. Every dorm has certain guys who run different hustles, and a good instance of this is the Soda Man. The Soda Man gives someone a book to buy him a case of sodas, he keeps a bucket of ice to make the sodas cold, and he sells the sodas off to inmates for three stamps apiece. He profits 16 stamps per case this way, but must also be constantly getting more ice. Other hustles include cleaning rooms, selling pre-made food like taffy, cheesecake, peanut brittle, burritos, yogurt, and various flavors of crack bars (no, not actual crack). People sell food stolen from the kitchen, extra sheets, blankets, T-shirts, manual labor in the form of washing inmate’s clothing by hand, and cleaning shoes. Some guys will pay you for personal training. All of the hustles have a commonly accepted stamp-based price. If something becomes harder to get or more in demand, the price goes up. The biggest price fluctuation I’ve seen is for cigarettes. At times you could ostensibly receive a whole pack of smokes for four books (about $20), but other times it could cost two books for one single cigarette. Whenever a big bust goes down, the price of cigarettes skyrockets.

I’ll assume—if you’ve managed to keep up with the stamp concept and the numbers—you’re wondering what the prison staff thinks of this. While virtually every single thing I have mentioned is against BOP policy, the staff does little to stop or prevent the economy from continuing. Counselors are even known to pay snitches in stamps to keep them up to date with who is doing what in the dorms. You’re only “allowed” to hold three books of stamps at a time, and occasionally when guys get busted, a bunch of stamps gets taken along with the inmate. I’ve yet to see enough stamps confiscated to dent the overall economy, though.

For the rest of my life, whenever I see a price, the first thing I’ll wonder is how many stamps it would cost.