Money

You can only spend $360 a month at commissary from your own account, so that is the practical ceiling on your own spending.

$360 per month per shopper. The operative phrase is “per shopper.”

Stamps and phone credit generally sit outside the cap, which is part of why stamps became the currency in the first place. The figure has held for a while but it is adjusted and it can vary locally — PS 4500.13, the Trust Fund manual is where it lives.

MoneyGram or Western Union. There is also a lockbox by mail, which is slower and cheaper.

Whoever is sending it should read the money chapter of the family guide once before they send anything, because the failure modes are all avoidable and all annoying.

Whatever you want. Food, hygiene, coffee, shoes, a radio.

No.

Men who do not spend their full limit will shop for you. It is how people get around the cap and it is unremarkable.

The mechanics of doing it without creating a problem for yourself are worth an actual conversation rather than a paragraph. Email me if you are about to do it for the first time.

Somebody in every unit sells items on credit, sometimes with a written list. Two-for-one means you take one now and pay back two on your next commissary.

That is a hundred percent interest over about a week. If you arrange something like this, make sure what they want back is not something you are already getting anyway. Do not fuck around with this.

Sure. It is also a prohibited act, and gambling debt is one of the two or three most common ways men end up in a situation they cannot get out of. Do not gamble anything you cannot cover.

Cents an hour. Not enough to matter, unless you get into UNICOR, which pays multiples of everything else.

I am sorry. This is a real position and a lot of men are in it.

Get a job inside. Find a hustle — cleaning cells, laundry, whatever you can do. Tell your counselor you are indigent so you at least get issued hygiene. It is harder than it should be and men do it every day.

The Inmate Financial Responsibility Program. If you owe restitution, fines, or child support, the Bureau takes a share of what comes into your account each month.

Your unit team sets the amount at each program review based on what is actually landing in your account. The floor is low — ordinarily $25 a quarter if you are not in UNICOR, and about half your pay if you are — and it climbs from there with your deposits. At my facility it worked out to roughly a sixth of everything coming in.

You can refuse. Read the next answer before you do.

You go into refusal status, which costs you your FSA benefits along with a list of other privileges. It is a bad trade for almost everyone.

The list is not vague. Refusal status means no furloughs, no performance pay above maintenance level, no UNICOR, a commissary spending limit far below the normal one, the lowest housing status, and no community-based programs — which is the halfway house. On top of that, refusal status is one of the conditions that stops you from earning First Step Act credits at all.

So the price of not paying $25 a quarter is months. Run it through the time calculator if you want to see the number.