From pecan pralines to ‘dots’ as currency: how the prison economy works

When economic freedoms are taken away, informal markets will always find new and ingenious ways to satisfy demand.

By Richard Davies

When Wilbert Rideau was 19, in 1961, he killed a man in a bungled bank robbery. After being convicted and sentenced to death, he was sent to Louisiana State Penitentiary, known by prisoners, guards and locals as Angola after a slave plantation that previously existed on the site. Rideau was given the label C-18. The C stood for "condemned", and the number denoted his place on the death-row list. His fate was to be the electric chair.

Rideau lived in isolation on death row for more than a decade, and read voraciously. He became interested in journalism and started to write. By the mid-1970s he was living in the main prison and editing the penitentiary's in-house monthly magazine, the Angolite. In the end Rideau avoided execution, and today he is undoubtedly Angola's most famous former prisoner. Under Rideau's 20-year editorship, the magazine won many national awards, but he first made his name as a prison reporter with a column he called The Jungle. The very first topic he chose was the working of the prison economy.

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