When you enter the men’s prison system in Tennessee, you receive two blue, smock-like shirts and two matching pairs of pants—”state blues,” as the outfit is known. You’ll also receive four T-shirts, four pairs of boxers and four pairs of socks. Then two sheets, two towels and two washcloths. Dehydrated, grayish starch is available in the chow hall free of charge. If you plan on needing anything else—shoes, soap, phone money, stamps, edible food—then you’re going to need a hustle.
At South Central Correctional Facility, the private prison where I’m currently incarcerated, a bar of soap costs about $2. Deodorant is nearly $4. I like to use both items. I prefer when those around me do as well, but there are many more people than jobs here. Those lucky enough to work are generally paid between $0.17 and $0.50 an hour. Most are making somewhere between $20 and $50 in a given month. Of course if you owe any court fees or other fines, you’re not going to see those wages at all. Hygiene is a luxury that many forego, and that many more would forego if they didn’t hustle for it.
When I began my sentence nearly 30 years ago, like so many others I came into the system with nothing. I had no financial resources on the outside and no familiarity with the prison economy. In the early years of my sentence, when prisons still gave out free tobacco, I made good use of the pouches of Top. I didn’t smoke, but I’d roll the tobacco into cigarettes and sell them to those who did. I’d get five out of each pouch, and it was never hard to find someone who wanted to soothe their nerves with a cigarette.
Prisons began banning tobacco in the 2000s, but cigarettes were hardly my only hustle. When you can’t provide a product, your other option is usually to provide a service. The better-known examples of each—contraband drugs, and sex work, respectively—were unfamiliar to me, and controlled by gang-affiliated prisoners anyway. But there are always other products, and other services.
Poems are bought and sold quite regularly.
Laundry was my hustle for a while. We’re allowed to buy certain non-state issue clothing items from Union Supply, the vendor that sells marked-up food, clothing and various other items to incarcerated people across the country, and such clothing is liable to find a new owner if sent out to the prison laundry. I found a few people who’d pay me to wash their clothes with a bar of Dial soap in a small plastic trash can. I’d hang the items on a shoestring clothesline, fold them when dry, and be that much closer to eating something edible from commissary.
Over the years I tried my hand at many of the common hustles. Making greeting cards, writing letters. A lot of these are things that more or less anybody can do, as long as you do a decent job. But a good hustle plays to your strengths. Artistic talent, for instance, is always monetizable in prison. We can’t go to the store and browse a selection of cards to give to loved ones on their birthday or during the holidays, so hand-drawn cards are a booming hustle in prisons across the country for anyone who can impress their neighbors with their drawing or calligraphy. Poems are bought and sold quite regularly, too.
My artistic medium is food, so my hustles evolved in the early 2000s when the facility I was at got its first microwaves. I busied myself experimenting to see what combinations of commissary items could be zapped into cake, or fudge, or casseroles. Pizza with a crust that’s actually crisp. Soon my hustles included a catering service where I’d cook and serve a meal, and a cooking class where I’d reveal my microwave secrets to others. Enjoyable, but labor-intensive.
Most prison hustles come from a desire for self-sufficiency.
I know my way around a microwave, but my real skill is relating to people—talking to them, getting them excited about something. Eventually, my hustle became a workshop I called “Creating a Prison Hustle.”
Every three months or so—whenever at least six people had signed up—I charged a bar of soap or a tuna pouch to attend my one-hour workshop. I’d assess everyone’s skills one-on-one, and help them develop at least three ideas they could begin to monetize.
I wasn’t conning them out of their tuna pouches. We genuinely developed existing skills into hustles. It was one of the most rewarding things I’ve been a part of while incarcerated.
One man who hadn’t thought he had any skills anyone in prison would be interested in had been a shoeshiner on the street. It’s true that there’s not a large market for that here, but there are always a few people with a pair of boots they’re willing to invest in, the way people will pay for private laundry service. This man had some method of shoeshining—burning ash was involved—that made boots look like glass when he was done. Even the officers started bringing him their boots. He’d teach the method to anyone interested, for a small fee, and whenever he got paid I got a cut too.
South Central is my ninth prison. At others, in years past, it was much more common for corrections departments to encourage this sort of skill-building. There were classes that taught wood-working or leathercraft, or other hobby-craft skills that are marketable both in and out of prison. Like everything else that at one point made prison more bearable, these programs have mostly been shuttered due to understaffing; South Central has no programming at all. Once the classes were gone, the wood or leather or other materials vanished too.
Some outsiders like to talk about prison as some sort of all-inclusive resort, where all our needs are provided for and we needn’t lift a finger. And many like to talk about all hustles as some means of violent, predatory extortion, as if every drug sold or every contraband cell phone used is a sign of greed and ill will. There are of course people who are gang-affiliated and looking to make a name for themselves. But most off-book sources of income in prisons are modest endeavors borne of desperation and, above all, the desire for self-sufficiency. It’s humiliating for a grown adult to ask their parent or child to please send $5 so they can buy toothpaste. We can’t afford to be dependent on the state; the state doesn’t give us anything.
Image via Cornhusker State Industries
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