This thread touches on goods being purchased in a prison commissary due to an inmate’s deposit in his commissary account from funds in his own personal accounts on the outside.
I know that, at least in some (most?) prisons, inmates receive trifling amounts of pay for their work (like 75 cents per hour or something). Do items in the commissary generally get priced at regular retail prices? So for example, that Snickers™ bar that costs me 75 cents at the local convenience store - does it cost a con an hour’s pay?
Further, is there a wide range of goods available at a commissary? I read a book by a guy who did some time and he mentioned how much he loved his commissary’s extra-spicy pork rinds (and the con was a Jew; go figure). By way of comparison, I note that at my high school (which was itself not much different from a prison, come to think of it), the commissary’s entire menu consisted of about three kinds of candy bars, two kinds of soda (Pepsi or Diet Pepsi), a couple of kinds of gum, and a few school supplies.
You call it comissary, we call it canteen, but it sounds like it amounts to the same thing.
Prisoners can only purchase items from the canteen list, some of these might be mail order goods, others are regular store stuff.
For the mail order stuff, they pay the same amount as anyone else, including special offers and the like, but from the regular store then everything tends to be more expensive, sometimes a lot more so, I have seen items such as tinned tuna being twice the price.There isn’t any access to the special offers over edibles that you might get from the supermarket.
For some reason known only to individual prisons, the canteen list and the rules that apply varies from establishment to establishment, for example in one prison, if the prisoner has enough money they can buy something straight out, yet in another they will have to build up the required amount week by week into a sort of ‘saving’ account, they will be limited in the amount of money they can transfer from their cash account to the saving account. The higher privelidge level you earn, the more you can transfer - incentive and earned privelidges system, it also encourages money management and planning.
Some things are completely off limits, other items are delayed due to the need to search and x-ray or carry out electrical safety tests.
I don’t know about pricing in a prison commissary, but Aramark is a fairly large company that offers commissary services to prisons. They acknowledge on their website that inmates have very little money to spend on snacks, so prisons need to maximize their commissions by offering national brands. (You didn’t think prisons offered commissaries out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?) I don’t think there’s the widest selection available, but the photos show well-stocked commissaries and mobile carts, so there is some variety. Unlike casdave’s example, which emphasizes saving over spending, Aramark’s business model seems to weigh heavily on the side of instant gratification and impulse purchases.
That being said, family and friends can send money to a prisoner’s account. In the past, you had to send a money order, but there are systems where money can be sent to the prisoner’s account online.
In terms of the relatively low wages prisoners make, it’s not like there are a lot of things to spend money on, and it’s not like they get a check or cash in their hands. (When my ex was in prison lo these many years ago, all money he received or earned went into his account, and any restitution he might have had to make was taken out of that.)