Smoking ban disrupts behind-bars bartering
Without cigarettes to trade, state's prisoners seek new currency

By JESSICA FENDER
Staff Writer

Published: Monday, 01/22/07

ONLY, Tenn. — Wardens across Tennessee are stamping out smoking at state prisons, driving the tobacco trade underground and throwing inmate-run black market economies into turmoil for want of a currency.

The state's 16 prisons, with 19,000 prisoners and 5,000 guards, will be smoke-free by June, an edict from legislators who in 2005 banned tobacco use in state-owned buildings. Some prisons have already started.

While the new restriction has angered prisoners, officials say they haven't seen a violent backlash from inmates jonesing for a smoke. And they say it's too soon to tell if the state will reap significant savings on prisoner health care.

The biggest change has been in the way business is done behind bars.

Cigarettes, a uniform and highly prized commodity, stood in for the dollar at Turney Center Industrial Prison here, which phased out smoking Oct. 1.

In a barter system familiar from prison movies, inmates calculated the value of other items based on their equivalent in smokes, inmate Michael Stanfield said.

"It was a standard. You based everything on the 'dollar.' How many packs does something cost?" said Stanfield, a convicted murderer who runs the prison's newspaper.

"The prison market has been in disarray because we don't have a standard anymore."

He thought stamps might be the next commodity, but nothing's come out on top, Stanfield said. Officials at the rural prison and farm speculate that food items from the commissary may emerge as the next currency.

Ban could ignite jealousies

The collapse of Turney's underground market is more than an academic lesson in economics.

As tobacco becomes scarce, the price of a single, hand-rolled cigarette has shot up to $4 on the black market, according to some accounts. That's what inmates once paid for an entire pack of brand-name cigarettes at the commissary.

When something becomes that valuable in a population of outlaws — an estimated
80 percent of them addicted to nicotine — it becomes dangerous.

It can ignite jealousies between the "haves" and the "have-nots," Stanfield said.

"With all things that are coveted in prison, there are some people who are going to get these things from time to time," Stanfield said. "The guy doesn't want to share. That causes tension."

The astronomical prices also tempt prison staff and visitors to smuggle in a product that's legal and relatively inexpensive in the free world, he said.

Bartering in general is not permitted at Turney, Warden Wayne Brandon said.

"It leads to other things that are not productive. It leads to people getting injured," he said, adding a lot of times it's not a fair trade.

"The big man says to the little bitty guy, 'I want your T.V., here's a pair of socks.' "

Contraband — homemade prison wine called juleps, homemade knives called shanks and illegal drugs — continue to surface behind bars despite shakedowns and security measures, Brandon said.

He doubts that cigarettes will ever disappear from state slammers entirely.

By last week, 48 people had been caught carrying or smoking tobacco on prison grounds, according to Correction Department data.

Fifteen of those were at Turney, including an incident Thursday in which an inmate confronted by guards burned a hole in his pants after hiding a smoldering cigarette in his clothing, Brandon said.

"You've heard of liar, liar pants on fire," Brandon joked.

How the man got his smoke isn't clear.

Dozens have bans

Other states with similar restrictions report visitors finding ways to get tobacco to inmates — like storing it in a balloon hidden in the mouth and passing by kiss, according to media accounts.

Department of Correction spokeswoman Dorinda Carter said she hasn't heard of any foiled smuggling attempts, but she suspects that forward-thinking inmates squirreled away smoking supplies before commissaries stopped selling them.

Where inmates could once smoke in their cells, on the grounds and just about everywhere else, they now face yet-to-be-determined punishments for possessing tobacco products, let alone lighting up.

More than 25 other states have similar bans, according to information from the American Correctional Association.

Tennessee has spent about $2,000 to offer little-used classes on quitting. The state also offers inmates costly nicotine lozenges at the commissaries. At $29 for 48 pieces, they would cost an inmate earning 50 cents an hour more than a week's wages.

Anyone who has tried to quit smoking or knows someone who has might expect turmoil — and not the economic kind — at state prisons as a result of the ban. But violent outbreaks have stayed about steady, Carter said.

At Turney there were six incidents in September, the month before the ban took effect. In October, the prison recorded seven.

Cigarettes were a stress release, a cure for boredom and one of the last pleasures afforded prisoners, Stanfield said.

"There was some concern that there would be fights and riots," he said. "By letting us know ahead of time … we were pretty much used to it. People are still grumbling."

Brandon says guards — also affected by the policy — are grumpier about the ban than inmates, who are accustomed to following rules.

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