Behind bars: stories, old and new, of money in prison

This paper considers the monetary forms that thrive in prison contexts, which lend themselves to the development of informal exchanges and parallel currencies. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews conducted in Portuguese men’s and women’s prisons in 2023, it considers formal and informal prison economies as interrelated and largely endogenous phenomena that derive from the structural, organisational and interactional features of confinement. The paper begins with a description of contemporary prisons as cashless environments with coercive allocation schemes before proceeding with an analysis of the parallel exchange circuits of both licit and illicit goods, taking into consideration the forms and functions of money behind bars. The following three aspects are highlighted: 1) the categorisations used by inmates to describe and valuate each other, which are delimited in a peculiar human economy; 2) the informal deals carried out behind bars; and 3) the pervasiveness of certain cash derivatives, such as tobacco, alongside clandestine schemes based on electronic money transfers.