I have sat in jail worrying about how I was going to get enough money to pay over a dollar for a nineteen-cent ramen noodle because the meals were so small you lived in a near-constant state of hunger.
That is not metaphor.
That is not political theater.
That is not some abstract critique of the prison system.
That is memory.
I remember the math of it. The low-grade panic. The humiliating calculations. How hunger itself becomes part of the punishment, and how quickly every tiny comfort gets converted into a commodity. A noodle cup. A phone call. A message. A song. A little proof that you still exist, that the outside world still remembers your name.
Everything costs.
That is what people on the outside do not understand. Prison and jail are not just cages. They are marketplaces. Closed, coercive marketplaces where the people trapped inside have no bargaining power, and the families on the outside get dragged into the bill.
That is why I keep coming back to the same question:
Who is really committing the crime here?
Is it the man in a cage trying to call his daughter?
Or is it the company charging his family inflated prices because it knows there is nowhere else to go?
Is it the woman in jail trying to eat enough to stop the gnawing in her stomach?
Or is it the system selling her a nineteen-cent ramen for over a dollar because captivity is a guaranteed market?
Is it the child who misses their father?
Or is it the whole industry that decided a child’s grief was a monetizable event?
Because one side is trying to survive.
The other side is billing for the privilege.
And only one of those looks like organized theft.
America has built a tollbooth between incarcerated people and the people who love them, then had the audacity to call it justice.
Phone call? Pay.
Video visit? Pay.
Email? Pay.
Tablet message? Pay.
Music download? Pay.
Commissary? Pay.
Ramen? Pay.
Soap? Pay.
Staying human inside a machine designed to hollow you out? Pay.
And somehow the people being looted are the ones called criminals.
That word, criminal, does almost all the moral work in this country. Once it gets stamped on someone, empathy short-circuits. People stop asking what is being done to them. They stop asking what is being done to their families. They stop noticing the extraction because the target has been marked as politically safe to exploit.
That is the scam behind the scam.
The public is told this is punishment, and so they stop seeing the profiteering.
But let’s be honest about what is actually happening.
This is not just punishment.
It is a business model.
A full-blown extraction economy built on captive poverty.
The people paying are not wealthy. They are not insulated. They are not taking these hits as a mild inconvenience.
They are mothers working overtime.
Grandmothers on fixed incomes.
Partners skipping things they need.
Families already living on the edge.
Kids trying to keep a relationship alive one overpriced interaction at a time.
That is who gets milked.
Not the executives.
Not the procurement officers.
Not the vendors wrapped in polished language about communication solutions and resident services.
The people getting drained are the people with the least.
And that is why this whole system is not just exploitative. It is cowardly.
It preys on those with no leverage and depends on the rest of society to look away.
If this exact business model were aimed at any other vulnerable group, we would call it predatory in half a second.
If a company trapped the elderly in a closed system and charged inflated rates for contact, we would call it abuse.
If it targeted disaster victims, we would call it looting.
If it built a paywall between children and their parents, we would call it monstrous.
But do it to prisoners and their families, and suddenly everyone gets procedural. Everyone gets cautious. Everyone starts talking about contracts and security and approved vendors and operational realities.
No.
Predation does not become ethical because it has a help desk.
Extraction does not become justice because it has a DOC contract.
And let’s say something else plainly.
A lot of reform organizations do good work here. Some are doing essential work. But even in that world, there are limits and frustrations worth naming. Research reports are not enough by themselves. Awareness is not enough by itself. Some groups produce excellent data that polite people read, nod at, and then nothing changes. Some advocacy spaces get so fluent in nonprofit language that the moral violence starts sounding bloodless. Some funders like the idea of reform right up until it gets confrontational enough to threaten real power.
That does not mean the work is fake. It means the machine is bigger than a white paper.
Still, if you want proof that this prison extraction economy is real and documented, not just my memory against the world, start here:
Resources and organizations
Worth Rises
Probably some of the clearest and most direct work in the country on prison profiteering. They do not just describe the problem, they name the business model.
https://worthrises.org/Prison Policy Initiative
Excellent research. If you want receipts, charts, fee breakdowns, telecom numbers, commissary economics, they have them. The critique is not of their work, but of the country’s ability to read devastating evidence and still tolerate the system.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/The Marshall Project
Strong reporting and real journalism. Necessary. But journalism alone does not stop an extraction racket that already knows how to survive exposure.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/Color Of Change
Has done meaningful work on prison telecom pricing and public pressure campaigns.
https://colorofchange.org/Fines and Fees Justice Center
Useful because prison extraction is part of a larger American addiction to monetized punishment.
https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/Worth considering if you want to build something better, not just expose the problem
Reform, arts, and justice funders sometimes talk seriously about rehabilitation, reentry, and dignity, even if the system around them remains allergic to deep change.- Just Trust: https://justtrust.org/
- Art for Justice Fund: https://artforjusticefund.org/
So yes, people are working on it. Good people. Serious people. Necessary people.
But the fact that they have to work this hard just to get the public to acknowledge the obvious tells you how deep the rot goes.
Because the obvious truth is this:
There is nothing just about turning captivity into commerce.
There is nothing rehabilitative about monetizing loneliness.
There is nothing moral about charging poor families for the right to remain emotionally intact.
And there is certainly nothing civilized about creating a system where a man in a cage is worrying about how to come up with enough money to buy an overpriced ramen noodle because the meals leave him hungry all the time.
That is not correction.
That is degradation for profit.
If we are serious about justice, then we need to ask harder questions than this country is comfortable with.
Not just: what did this person do?
But:
- who is profiting from their suffering?
- who is profiting from their family’s suffering?
- who built the tollbooth?
- who keeps raising the price?
- who hides behind the word criminal while running a racket in broad daylight?
Because the grandmother paying for the call is not the criminal.
The child waiting by the phone is not the criminal.
The hungry man trying to buy a noodle is not the criminal.
The people who built a market out of all of that deserve a lot more scrutiny than they get.
And until this country finds the courage to look at them directly, it will keep pretending that exploitation becomes justice if you aim it at the right people.
It does not.
It is still exploitation.
It is still theft.
And the rest of us should stop looking away.