The Company Store

I once lived in a migrant worker camp. I was a member of VISTA (now part of AmeriCorps), which was essentially the domestic Peace Corps. Along with two other college-age women and an extraordinary group of nuns (the Teaching Sisters of Notre Dame), we followed the “migrant stream” throughout the agricultural Midwest as families caravanned from sugar beet fields to cherry orchards to vegetable farms, picking crops and trying to live their lives. We ran programs for the kids while the parents worked. Kids under the age of twelve were not supposed to work in the field, although many did.

I mention this because just down the dirt road from our Wisconsin migrant camp “home” there was a company store. It was where everyone bought their groceries because there was no other place. The shelves were stocked with canned goods, convenience foods and junk food. There was no fresh fruit or vegetables. The store was owned by the same people who owned the orchards. And the workers would pick all day, get their buckets of cherries weighed, make their wages and then go spend most of that money at the company store.

Welcome to the world of the prison commissary. For many people in prison, their meager earnings (in Oregon from 5 to 47 cents an hour) go right back into the prison system when they buy goods from the only place they can, the prison commissary. It’s not unlike the migrant families we VISTAs lived with, or sharecroppers, or coal miners.

Prison commissaries sell hygiene and health necessities (soap, toilet paper) you would imagine the prison would provide but often doesn’t. (In some prisons, a person is allotted a roll of toilet paper a week.) Commissaries also sell candy bars and ramen noodles (the two most popular “food” items) plus instant coffee, Slim Jim’s, Doritos and other unhealthy snack and ready-to-eat foods you’d find on the shelves of your local 7-11.

When the Prison Initiative studied sales in the prisons in Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington, their report found that prisoners spent more money a year in the commissary than they made at their prison jobs. When their wages were not enough, they relied on family members to transfer money to their accounts — meaning that families were helping to subsidize the prison system (in addition, of course, to the taxed we all pay to support the system). Others in prison who lacked such support systems couldn’t afford the commissary at all.

Prisoners were not buying “luxury” items for themselves at these commissaries. They were buying the “food” that was available to supplement a sometimes inadequate, almost always tasteless prison diet (mostly high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food that would further erode their health). And they were buying anti-fungal cream to treat the athletes’ foot they got from the floor of the group shower. And paper and envelopes so they could write letters to their families. They were spending their wages, and their families’ money, at the company store.

More about the lives lived behind bars in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.