Friday, November 20, 2009

Prison Money

A friendly prof. sent me an article about the currency in prison. In the U.S., the old, gold standard - cigarettes, has now been replaced by "macks".

Mackerel fish. A can of the dastardly stuff goes for about $1. Two macks buy you a haircut, 400 macks a cellphone. There's obviously some elasticity in there, compared to the outside world. The prison has a cellphone-to-haircut ratio of 200 and the outside world, a ratio of about 6 (regular haircut, non-smart cellphone).

Explained easily enough:

Long hair, short hair, who cares? ...

The cellphone, OTOH, lets you keep tabs on your drug-peddling , allows cyber conjugal visits, helps plan the escape, etc...

So the currency is macks.

Me, I'd have thought it was simply the £.

Sorry. Prison joke.

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