Black Market In Tobacco Makes Prisons More Violent

SALINAS VALLEY STATE PRISON, Soledad, Calif. -- The Department of Corrections (and Rehabilitation) knew it was going to happen before it banned tobacco products from California prisons. An “experiment” was conducted for several years earlier in the California Medical Facility state prison in Vacaville banning all tobacco. Within weeks, tobacco was being smuggled into the prison by visitors and guards. One $10, six-ounce can of Bugler tobacco then sold for $50.00, gradually increasing to $300.00. Individual cigarettes or “rollies” (400 can be made), first priced at $1.00, became $10.00 each. Three months passed, and a pack of Camel cigarettes was selling for $150.00 plus. Violence erupted as profits proved tobacco to be more valuable than drugs. Everybody wanted a piece of the action.

No matter those disheartening findings, to “improve working conditions and cut health care cost among inmates,” the DOC bulled forward: there would be no smoking by inmates or guards beginning July, 2005. The results, as expected, mirror exactly what occurred at the California Medical Facility. Black marketing of tobacco became more profitable than marijuana or heroin, with penalties — if caught — a misdemeanor criminal offense, at worst. “So what if I get caught? What are they going to do to me?” asked one mother. “My son smokes, I smoke, and I won’t be in jail but a minute, if that.”

“Hell, my family was smuggling drugs in to me so I can help support them. Now, they bring me tobacco instead. We are living better, and they don’t have to worry about going to jail on a felony,” bragged one prison friend of mine.

Lt. K. Calhoun, a correctional officer at Northern Sierra prison camp, told one reporter, “I’ve never seen anything like it. A pack of cigarettes sells for $125.00!”

At 172,000 convicts, California has the largest prison population in our nation, filled with some of the most criminally sophisticated men and women in this country. Rather than limiting prisoners to “smokeless” tobacco products only, as most of the other states have done, state officials decided California would be one of only a few states to ban all tobacco products.

“We’re going to get ours,” one “gangster” told me. “Money is good.”

“Yeah,” his comrade followed up. “DOC knew what they were starting. All it has to do now to stop it is allow ‘smokeless’ products like the other states do.”

Tobacco will always be in prisons, just as there has always been every kind of illegal drug. There has been an increase in family members and friends willing to smuggle tobacco in, viewing it as a harmless pastime for incarcerated loved ones who have few to no other pleasures.

Inmates caught smoking risk little to no discipline. Most of the guards who once smoked here are now chewing tobacco (a violation) while others continue to smoke, discretely, when working. They are not going out of their way to enforce a law they view as ridiculous, and for the most part unenforceable.

Inmates on outside work crews pick up cigarette butts along the roadside and smuggle them back into the prisons where other inmates line up to buy the tobacco that has been culled. Brawls have broken out between different groups, and there have been a number of violent assaults as groups argued over who would get how much.

Recently, at the maximum-security prison at Pelican Bay, a convict who had been paroled hours earlier was found sneaking back onto prison grounds holding a pillowcase filled with 50 ounces of tobacco worth nearly $10,000. He had intended to throw it over the institution’s fence where his associates were waiting to retrieve it.

“It’s becoming a better market than drugs,” shared Correctional Officer Hawkes, an anti-gang coordinator at Pelican Bay. Actually, from where this writer sits, it already is.

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