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Leading Chicago Criminal Defense Lawyer Matthew Chivari summarizes excellent Report on Prison Commissaries

by | Jan 23, 2025 | Firm News

Leading Chicago Criminal Defense Lawyer Matthew Chivari summarizes excellent Report on Prison Commissaries. The Appeal describes itself as a “nonprofit news organization that envisions a world in which systems of support and care, not punishment, create public safety.” The journalism of the Appeal seeks to exposes “the harms of a criminal legal system entrenched in centuries of systemic racism.” Accordingly, the Appeal seeks to “equip people with the information necessary to make change, and we elevate solutions that emerge from the communities most affected by policing, jails, and prisons in the U.S.”

The Appeal has published what is hopefully an eye-opening Reports regarding prison commissaries. The Report is entitled, “Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated.” You can also go to: https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/.

The facts contained within the Appeal’s Report will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever been incarcerated, and their family members and friends. However, let’s hope that the great work of the Appeal will, someday soon, result in real action – including but not limited to legislation.

Here are the some of the highlights:

  1. Commissary prices for those incarcerated are as much as five times higher than charged outside prison walls, with markups as much as six hundred percent (600%).
  2. The Appeal has provided a database, which includes a first-of-its-kind database of prison commissary lists from 46 states.
  3. The Appeal examines such things as “the availability, prices, and markups of products across several categories, including food, hygiene, and religious items.”
  4. Those prices demonstrate an “exploitative, inconsistent system that requires incarcerated people to purchase many necessities at high markups.”
  5. The prices, for the identical items, vary widely by institution/State.
  6. The financial burden created by this system most often falls on the families of those incarcerated, who are ill-equipped to bear that financial burden.
  7. Even though detainees receive food, such food is provided to them in virtual child-size portions.
  8. Those foods are often literally inedible.
  9. Commissary, and the associated ridiculously high prices, thus become of central and heightened importance.
  10. Detainees have to pay exorbitant prices just to stay cool, for example, for a fan.
  11. Private companies with contracts with institutions are making outsized profits off the backs of detainees.
  12. Detainees are forced to pay exorbitant prices for hygiene products and over the counter medications.

There are some limited positives as reported by the Appeal. For example, there are some States that have statutes capping commissary mark-ups. Illinois is one such State.

In sum, defense lawyers need not only work hard to keep their clients out of prisons in order to preserve their liberty, shorter, shorter (or no) prison sentences will avoid some of the other harsh collateral consequences of serving time – including having them and their families being gouged at the commissary while detained.

Matthew Chivari

Leonard Trial Lawyers

January 23, 2025