I write a lot about the history of the convict leasing system on this blog. I don’t think we can properly consider U.S.labor, racial, or penal history without a thorough understanding of that pernicious system.

After chasing many immigrants off resulting in tons of agriculture jobs being unfilled, the state of Alabama has a bright new/old idea. The state is considering using prisoners to fill the void left by the flight of immigrant labor:

“Agriculture officials in Alabama are looking into using prisoners to fill a labor shortage that the agency blames on the state’s controversial new law targeting undocumented immigrants.

The Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries is meeting with south Alabama farmers and businesses in Mobile on Tuesday. Deputy commissioner Brett Hall says the agenda includes a presentation on whether work-release inmates could help fill jobs once held by immigrants.

Hall says planting season is coming up, and some growers fear most of their workers are gone. The agriculture agency says the new law has caused a chronic labor shortage on Alabama farms.”

Anyone who knows anything about Alabama’s sordid history of convict leasing should not be surprised that the state would turn to prisoners to do the back-breaking work that others will not do.

Mary Ellen Curtin’s excellent study about black prisoners in late 19th century Alabama illuminates episodes in American history that are pretty much unknown to us. Curtin contends that Alabama Democrats in the late 1800s turned to the convict lease system to address the state’s financial troubles. Coal companies were happy to make use of this convict labor but they were not the primary force pushing the practice. Curtin suggests that the lease system in Alabama left a lasting legacy:

“In the words of Populist critic William H. Skaggs, the lease was ‘vile,’ ‘pernicious,’ ‘excrable,’ ‘venal,’ and ‘brutal.’ It perpetuated ‘despotism’ by binding Alabama’s mineral interests to its political elite. It held the legal system hostage to the crass self-interest of county sheriffs, who collected fees for every prisoner they arrested, and politicians, who refused to forgo revenue paid for in human suffering. It linked race and criminality in a new and powerful way. It generated peonage by forcing convicted individuals to escape prison by allowing a local white landowner to pay their fine and thus control their labor. The lease shaped Alabama’s political economy and contributed to the legalized repression of African Americans during the age of segregation. Government officials and corporations willingly and knowingly traded prisoner’s lives for profit and revenue (p.10).”

Now that the state of Alabama has run off the undocumented workers who were willing to take on back-breaking agricultural work, they are planning to return to their tried and true ways of exploiting prisoners. We should remember Alabama’s history and legacy of convict leasing and we should strongly oppose a reinvented version of that system. We should reject trading the lives of undocumented immigrants for the lives of prisoners.

A big part of my mission on this blog is to feature examples of alternatives to incarceration. It is often difficult to find such stories reported in the news. The news prefers subscribe to the “if it bleeds, it leads” motto. Back in January of this year, I featured a story of restorative justice involving a mugging victim.

Now comes this story from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Wearing his hard hat and a sheen of sweat, Danny Pabst stepped away from the locomotive and watched as Michael Morgan swung a sledgehammer like a baseball bat, smashing it into a metal rod held by his older brother, William Morgan.

Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang.

The Morgan brothers, Pabst and others were trying to dislodge a rusted, bent, 3-inch-thick metal pin. It was connecting a piece to the exterior of a 60-year-old locomotive being renovated in a Norwood rail yard.

After 30 minutes of sledge swinging and oath uttering, the pin finally was freed.

“I like the work that they do,” a panting Pabst said of William, 34, and Michael Morgan, 30.

He likes their work so much, he’s decided to hire them.

But Pabst wasn’t as enamored of them in April, when the brothers broke into the rail yard – where Pabst restores privately owned, historic passenger railway cars at his Cincinnati and Ohio Railway Services company – and stole $7,000 in copper cables.

The seven cables, so heavy that the brothers also stole a plastic 55-gallon garbage can to carry them in, are the electrical umbilical cords that connect rail cars.

Police were unaware of the theft when they saw the Morgan brothers at about 4 p.m. April 28 on railroad tracks burning rubber coatings off cables to get to the copper wire. But when Pabst reported the theft the next day, police immediately made the connection.

They went to a nearby scrap yard, where workers told police they had paid $454.50 for copper brought in by William Morgan, who signed the receipt and was on video scrapping the copper.

The copper cables were being hauled by William Morgan in a gray garbage can just like the one Pabst said had also been stolen, scrap yard workers told police.

Arrests weren’t new to the brothers. William Morgan, a former iron worker, had been to prison once. Michael Morgan, who did odd jobs, had been twice. All were theft-related convictions.

They stole from Pabst, William Morgan said, because their father is ill and receives hospice care.

“Our dad’s dying of cancer and we’re trying to keep the (family) house,” William Morgan said.

The brothers, who live just blocks away, know the rail yard well.

“They’ve been running us out of here since we were kids,” William Morgan said with a laugh.

When they came to court in August, Pabst asked if they had cash to repay him the $7,000.

Because they had no money, Pabst offered a suggestion.

As attorney Greg Nolan, who represented Michael Morgan in his receiving-stolen property case, put it: “The words out of Danny’s mouth were, ‘These jerks, if they just would have only come to me in the daylight hours, I would have hired them. I’m desperate for help.’

“Given the number of copper thefts and the amount here, there was a good chance both of these gentlemen were going to jail.”

Pabst, though, persuaded Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman to place the brothers on probation so they could work off their debt to him.

“That’s amazing,” the judge said. “That’s a first. We don’t have that very often, where guys steal stuff and then actually come back and work for the victim, pay them back by working for them.”

The judge put the brothers on probation for a year so they could pay off the debt.

Read the rest of the story here.

Regular readers know that I have written about the intersection between immigrant detention and the prison industrial complex intermittently on this blog. You can find some of the posts here, here, and here.

Just recently I’ve become aware of the fact that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is attempting to build a huge, private immigrant detention center in a small town called Crete, Illinois, just south of Cook County. A coalition of individuals and organizations are mobilizing to create an action plan to stop this center from being built. As I get more information on that campaign, I will of course share it here.

In the meantime, I have come across a few resources that I would like to share about how criminalizing immigrants is big business. First, I suggest that everyone check out the Immigrants for Sale site. They are doing great work raising public awareness about these issues. Below is one of their latest videos about how private prisons are profiting off the detention of immigrants.

Another resource that I discovered over the past six months is a series of audio stories by the Common Language Project about the history of immigration detention and also about how immigrants are being treated in detention in the state of Washington today. They are excellent and informative. I highly recommend listening.

The excellent PBS show called “NOW” did a terrific expose about the nexus between immigrant detention and private prisons in 2008. You can watch that report here.

Finally, I am privileged to own two limited editions of a zine titled Detained by artist Eroyn Franklin. The zine follows the story of two immigrants as they navigate the detention process. The publication is educational and moving. I don’t know if there are still copies available but you can see various photographs of the images which were displayed as part of an exhibit earlier this year.

by Eroyn Franklin

As part of my ongoing interest in the history of prisons in the U.S. and especially in the convict leasing system, I am sharing excerpts from an article published in a magazine called “The Literary Digest” in June 1914. I came across this article as part of my research. I think that too few people truly understand the evolution of the criminalization and incarceration of black people in the U.S. As you read this account of a convict camp in Florida in the early 20th century, think about the parallels to what we see in many prisons today. Below are excerpts from the article:

“In the turpentine convict camps of Florida are human beings whose “degraded, debased, sordid” existence is “worse than any exile, worse than any slum district,” worse, even, “than Whitechapel, London.” So writes Marc N. Goodnow in the Continent (Presbyterian, Chicago, June 4), after a ten-days’ visit to one of these camps employing negro convicts — prisoners of the State. “No penitentiary in this country has ever equaled the sordidness of this or the other thirty camps in that State; no condition of servitude or savagery that I ever heard or read about has ever surpassed the state of inhumanity or hopelessness behind the whitewashed stockade of this camp.” The needs of the ignorant mountaineers of the South, declares Mr. Goodnow, “are as nothing compared to the oppression of these slaves; yet the former are aided in missions” and the latter receive no religious help and are “apparently unknown” to generous Christian givers. In the camp this writer particularly describes there are thirty-five negro men, “in all stages of human dilapidation.”

The State still reserves its “right to trade and barter” in their black bodies, “leasing them to an association for the sum of $281.60 a head per annum, and allowing that association to turn to lease them to individual camp contractors for the sum of $400 a head per annum.” The average profit on this transaction of $100 a head for 1,500 convicts is “easy money.” The convicts’ first sight of the “clump of low, white buildings, squatting under a blazing sun in a desert of sand and marsh, turns them sick.” And for many days they have to be closely guarded for fear of attempts to escape. In their embitterment and weariness, the one saving grace is their “irresponsible temperment,” which combines with a “mad desire to forget” to cause occasional evening and Sunday hours of merriment. But to let Mr. Goodnow describe a typical day in the camp:

“The day’s work begins out in the turpentine forest by the time the sun strikes the hooded tops of the slender, swaying pines, which means that the convicts are astir in the fetid bunk- and mess-rooms of the stockade building some time before. A hurried “bait” of salt meat and biscuit or corn pone breaks their fast; they file out of the stockade, hatless, coatless, bootless, and take their places in separate squads of ten to fifteen each, according to their duties in the woods. Then they begin the tramp — which may be several miles to work — an armed guard or two on horseback and a couple of hound dogs trailing along behind.

“It is dark when these tired, silent, ghostlike wretches file back into the stockade — perhaps wet to the skin and muddy with feet and legs torn and bleeding from contact with the sharp blades of the palmetto. The stockade is a welcome sight after a day in the woods, for it means rest and sleep or perhaps an evening diversion. Even supper of cold baked beans, fat meat, and corn bread will stir life afresh within these creatures. The plank, plink, plank of the banjo is enough. It starts a shuffle of feet and the fancy evolutions of the buck and wing begin.”

Sometimes on a Sunday, if prosperous-looking visitors make it seem worth while, a half dozen of the more talented convicts will put on a “show” or a dance.

“And while this show is in progress, several guards and dogs, and at least one of the convicts are absent. The guards are following the baying hounds through the forest. The dogs are following the trail of a convict as he speeds through the stubble of the woods, dodging here and there to throw the hounds off the scent, or – when the pursuit grows too hot – “shinning” to the top branches of a tree.”

This is the “nigger chase,” a weekly rehearsal to keep the dogs in training for the capture of some wretch who makes a break for liberty. Once.

“Nine convicts escaped from the bunk-room one dark night while the guard slept. To lose $3,600 in one night is rather expensive, even for a camp where the profit from turpentine and resin the year before is said to have been $25,000. And then, on top of this, of the six dogs that gave chase through the woods in a futile effort to capture the fugitives, three died. This was even a greater loss than the convicts or the money, for a hound-dog with a good nose for scenting convicts is an object of no little pride and care in a turpentine camp.”

by Billy Dee for the PIC IS Zine

[...]

There is no hope from within the camps, we are told. Magazines, books, and newspapers which Mr. Goodnow brought for the prisoners were kept by the guards. “There is supposed to be a library of some sort at each camp, but there is nothing of the sort.” It is said that nothing can be done for these convicts. “Florida has allowed this slavery system to grow and thrive for thirty-two years without turning a hand to better conditions.” But, declares Mr. Goodnow finally –

“The fact that this inhuman system has been allowed to flourish not only in Florida but in Alabama and other States for so long is all the more reason why the church — some church at least — should attempt some systematic mission work. When society exiled these creatures to malarial swamps, fever-breeding bayous, insanitary, sleeping and eating quarters, inhuman practices, and the hardest kind of physical labor, it forgot that these men would one day reenter society. The question is: ‘What kind of men will they be?’

“There may be no complete regeneration ahead of these men, at least not while they are so utterly neglected by civilizing influences, but how immeasurably their mental, moral, and spiritual outlook could be improved by the kindly, human, sympathetic influence of the church? Where is the church that will accept this mission?“

This is an open letter to some of my progressive friends who keep talking about “jailing” the banksters. It may be unpopular.

Dear Friends,

For the past three years, I have ignored your comments about the need to put some of the bankers and Wall Street financiers in jail/prison for their role in destroying our economy. I felt that you needed to blow off some steam and that you were entitled to be hyperbolic in doing so. I too am incredibly angry over their actions. I too want some form of accountability.

Well we are now three years removed from the 2008 economic meltdown and the Occupy Wall Street movement is nascent. This is an exciting time and I feel so grateful that the national conversation has shifted to addressing economic justice. However in the midst of this mass mobilization of the dispossessed, I still hear you talking about jailing the robber barons of Wall Street. In fact, you are on the streets holding up signs to this effect:

The air is ripe with anxiety, anger, and demands for “justice.” Crusading documentarians declare that they hope their films will lead to the prosecution of bankers. When I turn on my television, I hear you suggesting that nonviolent protestors are being arrested while not a single banker has been.

I am with you on the fact that nonviolent protestors should be allowed to freely demonstrate. However, we part ways when you compare their treatment to that of criminal bankers. My reason: I don’t think that we will get “justice” because one banker finds him or herself locked up in a cell. I guess that our definitions of “justice” differ.

I hear you insisting that if bankers were jailed, we would have more fairness in our economy. I don’t believe you when you make this case. I don’t think that you really believe this to be true either. It is capitalism that breeds inequality and we have to dismantle it to bring more fairness.

I want to share a few words about prison with you. Prison is a terrible place. I know that you already know this and you may not care. You may think that criminal bankers deserve to spend time in hell for their actions. Yet somehow because I know that most progressives are particularly concerned with humaneness, I cannot accept that the knowledge that prisons are torture chambers will leave you unmoved. Prisons do not deter or rehabilitate; they make people worse.

We agree on so many other issues. But on this one, the jailing of bankers, we part company. I do not want to further extend the reach of the prison industrial complex. The solution to injustice is not to heap more injustice on top of it. There is a quote by Buckminster Fuller making the rounds on Facebook over the last few days and it is relevant to our discussion today:

In other words, what I want is a new model for addressing all forms of harm. The current legal system is oppressive, inhumane, corrupt and irreparably broken. I think that forcing criminal bankers to make restitution for their harms by paying back money that they stole would provide more accountability for their actions than prison ever will. I believe that a “sentence” of spending three years figuring out how to develop truly affordable housing for the poor would provide accountability. There are dozens of other creative ways that we could insist that bankers contribute to the commons without incarcerating them. I don’t want anyone locked in cages and this includes odious banksters.

I want to bring up another point of contention with you. True economic justice also involves dismantling the prison industrial complex. Many prisoners are exploited for cheap labor. Our unemployment rate is held artificially low by locking people up and taking them out of the labor market. Finally as the National Prison Industry Divestment Campaign makes clear, Wall Street profits through its investment in the prison industrial complex too.

I want to stand in solidarity with you, my progressive friends, who are calling out corporate greed and advocating for economic justice. I desperately want to do this but I am asking that all of us reject the viscerally reflexive calls for more incarceration. We already have a national policy of mass incarceration. Let’s not play into this by criminalizing more people. Instead how about we imagine and build a world without prisons where we can still get accountability for harm done? Let’s expand on the positive vision of a country free of the plague of mass incarceration. What we need in these times is a mass movement that also calls for decarceration. Progressives need to be in the forefront of this movement which should be linked to our calls for economic and social justice. See you at the next rally, I’ll be the one carrying the sign marked: “Don’t Jail the Bankers, Occupy Prisons Instead.”

Peace to you all.

Signed Your Friend, Prison Culture.

I really like this poster created by Josh MacPhee over at Justseeds Artists' Cooperative.

By Josh MacPhee

Here’s what he wrote about this print:

Been working on this for a couple days now, a poster connecting the Occupy! movement to the struggle to free political prisoners and end prison injustice. The quote is from a beautiful poem by Assata Shakur. If you don’t know who she is, PLEASE run out and read her autobiography today. I’m not kidding, just do it!

This is going to be an angry post. It is unapologetically so.

I challenge anyone who has one iota of compassion for children to watch this news report and not feel sick to your stomach.

This feels to me like the Roman Colosseum — the incarcerated youth of Murphysboro hardly figure into these proceedings. They are merely pawns in a high stakes game waiting to be thrown to the lions. Meanwhile the politicians are arguing to keep a youth prison open because community members will lose their jobs. It is too much. Profiting off others’ misery is disgusting.

In the midst of my rage, I am trying to muster some sympathy today for the community members who are going to be losing their jobs. But honestly, how can you advocate to keep a prison that houses CHILDREN open at all costs? It is sick and selfish. The Governor has made promises to relocate workers to other state facilities for God’s sake. I am throwing an emotional tantrum but somebody has to. By the way, I do not want these young people shuffled to another prison. We need to DECARCERATE this state. Let’s shift just 10% of the $140,000 a year that it costs to lock these children up to community-based alternatives instead. It will be more humane, efficient and cost-effective.

These are OUR children locked up in these prisons. We should all be screaming bloody murder about this. We should all remember that the Mayor of Murphysboro, Ron Williams, had this to say about the value of the young prisoners to the town:

“They do everything we ask, whether it be trimming shrubs, sweeping gutters, cleaning up sidewalks, picking up trash out of the street. They do it willingly and a smile on their face,” says Williams.

Are you F’ing kidding me? Doesn’t this make you think of Little Black Sambo? This should make it crystal clear what some of the the townfolks think of the majority black and brown youth prisoners at IYC-Murphysboro.

Let me also make it crystal clear that I DO NOT want to transfer a youth prison for an adult prison either. The point should be to close the facility PERIOD. Not to replace youth bodies with adult bodies. Enough!

The people who are advocating that IYC-Murphysboro remain open are condoning this:

by Steve Liss

If you live in Illinois and are at all concerned about these issues, I invite you to a TEACH IN about Closing Youth Prisons that is taking place on Saturday October 29th from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. I can only hope that the teach-in is as packed as the hearing room in Murphysboro was. We need to rally a base equal in size at least to the people who support the status quo.

You can visit the "Closing Illinois Youth Prisons" blog for more background on the failures of juvenile incarceration.

I write regularly about the intersection between prison and food. This weekend I came across another interesting connection between food and the prison industrial complex.

A Muslim Death Row prisoner filed a lawsuit alleging that his religious freedom was being abridged because Ohio Prisons refused to serve him Halal meals while they did provide Kosher meals to Jewish prisons.

In response to the suit, Ohio prison officials decided to eliminate pork from all meals served to prisoners in the state. Well this decision does not sit well with Ohio's pig farmers:

Ohio’s pork farmers and processors are vowing to fight the state’s decision to remove pork from prison menus in response to a lawsuit by Muslim inmates.

Dick Isler (IHS’-ler), executive director of the Ohio Pork Producers Council, says the news is especially disappointing because his group fought to have pork placed back on the menu in 2009.

This is another instance that illustrates what we mean when we discuss the prison industrial complex. Pork producers are depending on the business that prisons provide to them in order to make a living. They have a vested interest in the existence of prisons.

According to a press release that I received yesterday:

“Jake Cronin, a policy analyst with the Institute of Public Policy in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, studied Missouri Department of Corrections data and found that inmates who earned their GED in Missouri prisons were significantly more likely to find a job after prison and less likely to recidivate than inmates who did not. Cronin found the biggest jump in reduced recidivism rates, more than 33 percent, when he looked at inmates who earned a GED and acquired a full-time job after their release.

“Employment proves to be the strongest predictor of not returning to prison that we found,” Cronin said. “Those who have a full-time job are much less likely to return to prison than similar inmates who are unemployed. Recidivism rates were nearly cut in half for former inmates with a full-time job compared to similar inmates who are unemployed. Inmates who take advantage of the educational opportunities available to them in prison are more likely to find a job than those who do not.”

Cronin says these reduced recidivism rates can save the state a substantial amount of money in reduced incarceration costs. He points to a similar study which found that educational programs that reduced recidivism rates saved the state of Maryland $24 million a year, which is twice the amount of money spent on the program. Cronin believes this shows that correctional facility educational programs are a good investment for the state of Missouri.

“If similar results occur in Missouri, which I would expect given the findings of this study, that would mean the state is currently saving more than $20 million a year in reduced incarceration costs as a result of correctional education programs,” Cronin said. “In this political environment, states across the country are looking for ways to save money. This is one program that, in the long run, saves the state money. It is a good investment; an investment that has a high rate of return.”

This is directly relevant to current prisoners. My pen pal Randy Miller who is incarcerated at Indiana State Prison is an advocate for prisoner education. Here is a letter to the editor that he wrote a couple of months ago about this topic:

Recent legislation passed by Indiana law makers eliminated the bachelor’s degree program from all Indiana State Prison beginning in the fall semester of 2011. The reason given by Governor Mitch Daniels and the state legislators for this action, is that it is unfair for tax payers to be burdened with the cost of covering educational expenses for convicted felons. This may be a valid argument, except that financially it is an outright lie.

The cost of college expenses in the 2010 school year for all Department of Correction inmates was $9.06 million, covered by the Obama grant program. Under new legislation, only $2 million will be allocated to the Department of Corrections to cover educational expenses for college. On the surface this appears to be a financially sound move and looks to save tax payers $7 million a year, but let’s look at what it really costs.

The state of Indiana pays the Department of Corrections just under $58 per day, per inmate, or $21,170.00 per year. There are approximately 361 inmates eligible to receive a bachelor’s degree each year within the Department of Corrections. Obtaining a bachelor’s degree cuts two years off an inmates sentence, saving tax payers $42,340.00 per inmate. By eliminating this opportunity for an average of 361 inmates state wide per year, Governor Mitch Daniels and your state legislators have saved you the tax payer $7 million a year in educational expenses to inmates, and burdened you with $15,284,740.00 per year to house inmates who now cannot receive this time cut. These costs do not include the rising rate of recidivism bound to follow these cuts in education.

Governor Mitch Daniels wants to move to technical schooling to teach inmates a trade rather than a general education, even though these trades have been shown and proven to have little to no effect on lowering recidivism rates. As it stands today, the average recidivism rate in Indiana is at 63 percent. A bachelor’s degree cuts that rate to less than 8 percent! Under Governor Mitch Daniels, Indiana has led the nation in prison population growth, with a prison population increase of more than 6 percent per year. Even California, a state who’s prison population dwarfs Indiana’s in comparison, cut it’s prison population by almost 3 percent.

It is time to change the way we think about the Department of Corrections. It is unfeasible to think you can warehouse inmates and ignore the problem, especially when more that 95 percent of those inmates will be re-entering society someday. The single most beneficial tool we have to lower crime rates, reduce recidivism and ensure the success of inmates re-entering society is education. There is absolutely no benefit for anyone in cutting educational funding to prisoners and eliminating the bachelor’s degree opportunity to inmates.

By
Randy Miller #154124
Indiana State Prison
August 6, 2011

I thought that some readers would find it interesting to know just how much stuff costs at Illinois prison commissaries.

Prisoners who do not have a job currently receive up to $10.00 “state pay” each month. This amount has not been increased in many years. Additionally, Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) usually deducts 3-4% from the $10.00 to cover housing costs. And sometimes the “state pay” is not in fact paid. The “state pay” is used to cover other costs the prisoner has that are not covered by the IDOC. For example:

* Deodorant-$2-4.00 on commissary. None supplied.
* Toothpaste-$2-4.00 on commissary. Not supplied on a consistent basis or at all.
* Toothbrushes-$0.50 on commissary. Very rarely supplied by IDOC.
* Soap- small (1″ by 2″) bars-nondeoderant, provided to each inmate each week. $0.40 per bar at commissary.
* Shampoo. $1-3.00 at commissary. None provided
* Laundry detergent-$4-5.00 at commissary. None provided.
* Lotions-$2-4.00 on commissary. None provided
* Shaving Equipment-one single edge razor provided at most once per week. Usually, 2-3 times per month.
* Shaving equipment-electric razor or trimmer combs purchased from $10-50.00 from commissary.
* Fans-cell houses have no air conditioning. General population cells have no windows. Fan costs $25.00 from commissary.
* Legal services-copies of legal decisions and other similar materials at $0.05 per Pages.
* Food-IDOC provides three meals a day (quality questionable). Additional food, coffee, condiments, etc., must be purchased from commissary.
* Clothing-currently, inmates are fortunate if they receive two pairs of boxers, socks, twoT-shirts, one blue shirt, one pair of pants from IDOC. Due to budget cuts, this happens only once per year. Formerly, an inmate would receive these items four times per year. Inmates do not receive boots, even during winter months, other than slipper-type shoes. Regular shoes must be purchased from commissary. Costs range from $12-66.00.
* A towel and washcloth may be given 1-2 times per year.
* All electronics must be purchased from commissary. Extension cords, cable cords, headphones, TV’s, radios, splitters, lights, light bulbs, batteries, razors, etc.
* Cold/allergy/pain relievers are purchased from commissary. The nurses/med techs formerly provided the at the cost of the $2.00 co-pay, but don’t have them anymore.
* Envelopes/paper/pens to write to family, friends are not provided and must be purchased from commissary. An envelope with stamp currently costs $0.53.

(H/T to the Illinois Institute for Community Law and Affairs for this information)

Note: No sooner had I posted this was I reminded that the vast majority of the items listed above are not full sized but travel sized items. Thanks Dan for the reminder.