Prison Labor & Economics

A Captive Market: Commissary Pricing and Monopoly Extraction

GPS's Georgia’s Prison Commissary Extraction Machine collection documents a captive retail economy in which the Georgia Department of Corrections and its vendors set prices without competition. A 3-ounce packet of Maruchan ramen that retails for $0.15 per unit in bulk—or $0.31 per packet in a 12-pack at Walmart—costs incarcerated people $0.90. A package of 20–24 generic 200 mg ibuprofen tablets sells for $4.00 in the commissary, while the same quantity at Walmart retails for roughly $0.40–$0.48 based on 100-tablet bottles priced at $2.00. These are not anomaly markups; they are the model.

This regime is reinforced by a national communications duopoly. The prison communications industry generates $1.4 billion annually through monopoly telephone, tablet, email, and money-transfer services, with Securus Technologies and ViaPath Technologies controlling approximately 80% of the U.S. market and serving roughly 3,450 correctional facilities. Families spend $5.6 billion a year on commissary, phone calls, and other basic necessities, with markups reaching 600% above retail. The pricing structure effectively converts basic survival goods into revenue streams.

At least 49 state prison systems and the federal Bureau of Prisons have some form of inmate welfare fund; 39 draw revenue from commissary purchases, and 19 draw from communications kickbacks, including phone, email, and video-calling user fees. This creates a perverse incentive: the more incarcerated people and their families pay for hygiene, food, medicine, and communication, the more money prison welfare funds capture for facility operations. Georgia-specific, facility-level reconciliation of welfare fund revenue is a data gap in the GPS collections, but the state sits inside a national architecture built to profit from captivity.

Prison Labor: Billions in Value for Near-Zero Wages

Approximately 800,000 incarcerated people work in state and federal prisons across the United States, producing more than $2 billion per year in goods and more than $9 billion per year in services for prison maintenance. These workers cook, clean, launder, construct, and maintain the facilities that confine them, yet the wages they receive are often pennies per hour. In Michigan, by comparison, incarcerated workers earn an average of $12 to $16 per month, depending on court circumstances and job description. Georgia-specific wage data is fragmentary in the collections GPS has assembled, which is itself a finding: the state can document what it charges prisoners for ramen, but not what it pays them for labor.

This labor system is not an accident. The 13th Amendment’s exception clause permits involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, and Georgia’s Convict Leasing Program collection traces the state’s use of incarcerated labor from 1866 through the present. The same infrastructure that once leased Black prisoners to plantations and mines now assigns prisoners to prison-industry jobs and facility maintenance. The wages may be marginally higher than leasing-era payments, but the underlying power relation—unfree labor compelled by the state—remains legally intact.

Families as the Hidden Tax Base

The people who pay for the prison economy are largely not taxpayers; they are families. Direct out-of-pocket spending averages $4,200 per year for people with an immediate family member in prison—more than 27% of income for someone at the federal poverty line. The total annual cost to families of incarcerated people is nearly $350 billion, almost four times the $89 billion taxpayers spend on jails and prisons, according to FWD.us and researchers at Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago. That includes $5.6 billion a year spent on commissary, phone calls, and other basic necessities.

This financial burden pushes families into debt. Roughly 65% of families with a loved one in prison were unable to meet their basic needs because court-related fines and fees sent them into debt of more than $13,000 on average, according to an Ella Baker Center survey. Meanwhile, 48 of 50 states and Washington, D.C., allow at least one category of pay-to-stay fee—adult room and board, adult medical, youth room and board, or youth medical—and 26 states explicitly allow both room-and-board and medical fees for adults and youths. The hidden tax base is not hidden because it is small; it is hidden because the state does not count it as part of the correctional budget.

From Convict Leasing to Modern Revenue Recycling

Georgia’s prison economy has always been a revenue model. The state’s convict leasing program, which began in 1866 and continued in mutated forms into the present, turned incarcerated labor into a source of profit for private interests. The modern commissary and communications systems replicate that logic without the chain gang: private vendors and state agencies extract money from people who cannot leave and whose wages, if any, are too low to absorb the cost.

The welfare fund is the quiet mechanism that launders markups into institutional spending. A majority of prison systems—at least 39—draw welfare fund revenue from commissary purchases, and 19 draw from communications kickbacks. In these systems, inflated prices do not simply enrich vendors; they also fund the prison’s own programming, recreation, and sometimes even basic operational items. This creates a structural conflict: the state has a financial interest in high prices because the welfare fund captures a portion of each transaction. GPS’s Georgia’s Prison Commissary Extraction Machine collection identifies this as a national pattern, but Georgia’s own welfare fund ledger is not publicly detailed in the collections reviewed.

Fiscal Pressures, Staffing Collapse, and the Contraband Economy

Georgia spends roughly $1.8 billion a year on its prison system: the FY2026 original budget totaled $1.712 billion, and the amended FY2026 budget reached $1.799 billion. Yet the Georgia Department of Corrections still operates with a systemwide correctional officer vacancy rate of nearly 50%, with 2,985 vacant CO positions out of 5,991 budgeted positions and eight facilities reporting vacancy rates of 70% or more. The state’s prison labor system and its paid workforce are both in crisis.

Underpaid and overextended staff are vulnerable to the same extraction economy. At least 428 GDC employees were arrested for on-the-job criminal conduct between January 2018 and September 2023—an average of more than seven per month—and roughly 360 of those arrests involved contraband introduction or smuggling. Another 25 employees were fired for contraband without being arrested. Roughly 80% of arrested employees were women, reflecting a workforce demographic most exposed to recruitment by contraband rings. Assaults on staff rose 77% between 2019 and 2024, while assaults on incarcerated people rose 54% over the same period. The economic model—low wages inside, high prices at the commissary, and a staffing crisis—feeds a parallel violence economy.

Data Gaps and Contradictions

Across the GPS collections, there are unresolved tensions. Guidehouse’s December 2024 systemwide assessment describes GDC managing approximately 49,000 offenders with a workforce of 6,400 employees, while budget documents put the number of offenders serving prison sentences at more than 50,000. The appropriations record shows a $1.712 billion FY2026 original budget and a $1.799 billion amended budget, yet the system cannot fill half its correctional officer posts. Most important for labor and economics, no public, facility-level ledger in the 31 collections reconciles Georgia’s prison wages, commissary markups, and welfare fund expenditures in one place. The absence of that ledger is not a neutral gap. It obscures who profits from prison labor, who pays for prison upkeep, and how much of the $1.8 billion annual cost is ultimately financed by the poorest families in Georgia.