Illustration by Deshi Deng
In many prisons, the most valuable commodity is not tobacco or even hard drugs, but smut. Not everyone gets high or smokes, but every inmate jerks off, out of loneliness or horniness or sheer boredom. During my 21 years of incarceration in America, the one thing that I missed more than anything else was the company of a woman, especially as I had no conjugal visits while in the feds.The most common form of porn that's circulated in prison is photocopied smut magazines, though modeling magazines that don't have nudity are also popular. Often, actual hardcore porn mags are smuggled in by correctional officers looking to make some extra money. If you have a magazine in its entirety, it can be hawked to other inmates for upwards of $200, depending on what condition it's in. The owners then make copies and resell them in black-and-white for $20 a pop. Copies (e.g. copies of copies) of spreads or certain pin-ups are then sold for a stamp a page, and prisoners often trade when they get bored of "their girls."The other popular form of sexual entertainment is photos from the web that friends or family on the outside print out in bundles, then send through snail mail. A porn DVD—extremely rare in prison—can bring several hundred dollars to the officer who smuggled it in; phones with downloaded porn videos are sold for upward of $500."It's crazy the prices we pay," one prisoner recently told me over the phone. "But then again, it's prison. Checking out a little porn is all a guy really has to look forward to."Since most prisons nationwide have banned porn, prisoners will go to great lengths to both preserve and conceal their collections. Depending on the individual institution's rules, punishments can range from confiscation or time in solitary confinement to disciplinary transfers to new criminal charges for the introduction or possession of sexually explicit materials. Some prisons have made masturbation, even without porn, an infraction.To get some insight about how prisoners share smut today, we talked to several prisoners doing time around the nation to learn how they get porn in, how it's traded among inmates, and what it's like to hide something that free Americans spend countless hours with each day.Prisoner One
There are dudes in prison who live well on the porn trade. They have regular customers, as it's an addiction to some people. I had this old, beat-up issue of Just 18 magazine from 1999 with about half the pages missing that I used to rent out. The cost to rent was five stamps—approximately $1.50—for a 30-minute rental. That gets a little costly for a serial jacker. Certain dudes who are considered creeps have problems with masturbation, like real addiction problems, and I try to stay away from them. I sold that issue of Just 18 for $100 right before I transferred to another prison.
In another jail, my homeboy had a copy of Buttman. This magazine was kept in a pristine plastic protector. He sold it for $200 right before he left. Another guy in here just got shipped from FCI Texarkana to Beckley for getting caught smuggling in a computer. He was renting it out for $5 an hour, and had hundreds of porn videos downloaded. When he got caught, he was taken back to court and received another six month sentence.
Dudes will also sell photos that are sent to jail from their families or homeboys. They'll send a stack of pictures, and the inmates will sell them for three to four stamps a piece. Some inmates, they get tired of the same pictures, so they just rotate and trade them for a new chick. The price of a single photo depends on how fat the girl's ass is. Some guys will even put out special requests or orders for specific girls or porn stars. I've seen inmates become infatuated with them, as if they were literally their chick.
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