Soap or Toothpaste: How Prison Commissary Systems Force Inmates to Choose Between Basic Necessities
Prisoners, set apart and largely isolated from the rest of society, are heavily reliant on the prison system to supply their day-to-day needs. However, in many instances, prisoners are not just given these necessities. Rather, they are expected to purchase them themselves through the prison commissary. Depending on the state, inmates may earn money to spend at commissaries through working in prison. Otherwise, family or friends on the outside may put money in an inmate’s account. However, the system of commissary poses a number of potential problems for those in incarceration: for one, many commissaries are plagued by price-gouging. Mark-ups on items in commissary are sometimes as high as 600 percent. How do prisoners afford goods under these conditions? In short: many of them cannot.
While some inmates may receive some necessities if they are indigent, qualifying for indigency is often incredibly difficult. In Georgia, inmates need to have less than $10.00 in their accounts to be indigent. In South Carolina, the cut-off amount for indigency is $6.42 each month. In some states, an inmate needs to have less than $5.00 in their accounts in order to qualify as indigent. In Virginia, the less-than-5-dollars cut-off is evaluated based on the funds that were available during the previous mouth, meaning even an individual who currently has less than $5.00 in their account could still not qualify as indigent. For North Carolina, there is no specific dollar amount, and indigency is just defined as having “no money to purchase basic hygiene items such as soap or deodorant.”
To put some of these amounts in perspective, a box of tampons is around $6.60 after tax in Virginia and $6.33 in South Carolina, making tampons either the only product some South Carolina inmates could afford to buy in a mouth, or completely unaffordable for some Virginia inmates. Even for inmates not in need of feminine hygiene products, other less expensive toiletries may quickly add up to be unaffordable to non-indigent inmates. For example, say an inmate needed access to, at minimum, a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, soap, shampoo, and deodorant. In South Carolina state prisons, the cheapest available options for each of those products would be as follows: $0.79, $0.92, $1.39, $0.62, $1.84, $1.92, for a total of $7.48, over a dollar more than the indigency cut-off.
Issues continue to arise even if inmates in prisons do qualify as indigent. An inmate who is completely reliant on the indigent hygiene kits is left at the mercy of whatever prison officials have deemed “necessary,” which in many cases falls short of actual needs. The supplies that are provided to indigent inmates varies widely by state. In some states, like Georgia, indigent inmates are given funds, but are not given any goods – the inmate is still responsible for budgeting and deciding what to purchase. Indigent inmates in South Carolina are given one tube of toothpaste, one toothbrush, three soaps, two or three 3-in-1 gels, two sticks of deodorant, four disposable razors, and a comb. Basic hygiene kits in Virginia also include denture cleaner and adhesive. While better than nothing, these basic necessities do not include other essentials like feminine hygiene products, or products that help provide basic comfort like lotions or over-the-counter medicines.
Some prisoners may be able to scrounge up money to buy additional items through prison jobs. However, pay for prison labor is on average less than a dollar an hour. North Carolina inmates may be paid as little as $0.40 an hour. Inmates in North Carolina often work in back-breaking outdoor labor, such as on plantations and farms, on state roads, or firefighting. For the lowest paid inmates in North Carolina to buy a four-ounce bottle of sunscreen (priced at $5.16), they would have to work nearly 13 hours. Other states like Georgia and South Carolina do not even pay inmates for their labor, leaving individuals no way to procure funds if they do not qualify for indigency and have no one on the outside who is able to give them money. Even for paid inmates like those in North Carolina, already low wages often become even lower after the prison deducts money for various reasons such as court fines, taxes, and room and board. Some prisons deduct up to 80 percent of the wages awarded to inmates.
The system of commissary in prisons does little to ensure the basic needs of prisoners are met. By commodifying inmates’ access to products essential for basic hygiene and comfort, prisoners may be forced to make difficult decisions between necessities, labor for days to purchase items, or simply go without. In recent years, inflation has compounded problems with affordability, but that does not account for the whole issue. For instance, in North Carolina, each state prison gets to set their own commissary prices, and many are choosing to markup prices to increase prison profits. Without regulations on how prisons run commissary, inmates will continue to struggle making ends meet.
Kyra Goins
Class of 2026, Staff Member