Thanks to Cory Doctorow for bringing to our attention in the “Greedflation, but for prisoners” issue of his daily newsletter that The Appeal has unveiled a new national commissary pricelist database, which can be used to compare how items are priced across 46 states.
Kudos to Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Ethan Corey and everyone else who contributed to this 9 month investigation that found some prison commissaries operating with markups as high as 600 percent.
The Appeal is described on its website as “a nonprofit news organization dedicated to exposing how the U.S. criminal legal system fails to keep people safe and, instead, perpetuates harm.” The news organization works to show “the human and economic costs of our expansive carceral system, equips people with the tools to make change, and elevates solutions that seek to create a safer society without clinging to punitive responses.”
In another recent newsletter, Doctorow describes why the prison tech provider Securus, with over $1.3B in debt, is now facing bankruptcy, and how the brilliant guerrilla activist campaign of the New York organization Worth Rises exemplifies “using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.”