"There's an old saying in Urdu: Zaroorat ijaad ki maa hai (necessity is the mother of all inventions). I would often hear it as a child growing up in Pakistan. I've always been fascinated by how some phrases leap across languages without losing their truth. You see, survival has a universal dialect, and here, behind the castle walls of New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), necessity isn't just a mother, it's a warden, a foreman, and a constant whisper in your ear."
"Like the chains and hooks once used for corporal punishment in the basement of the Warden's House at NJSP, prison labour is a relic of another time. It is a system that still smells faintly of chain gangs and sweat-soaked fields. Here at NJSP, we work because we're told to, for pennies on the dollar. According to the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a non-profit that researches mass criminalisation in the US, prisoners can earn as little as $0.86 per day."
Inside New Jersey State Prison a dual economy operates as prisoners rely on internal markets to survive. Prison labor remains a relic of chain gangs, with inmates working for pennies on the dollar. The Prison Policy Initiative reports prisoners can earn as little as $0.86 per day, and ACLU research shows many states pay $0.15–$0.52 per hour for sanitation, with some paying nothing. The Department of Corrections budget runs in the billions, yet inmates often only afford soap or soup from the commissary. Prisons collect about $2.9 billion annually from commissary sales and phone calls, and markups can reach 600 percent, forcing a secondary economy.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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