In Tennessee state prisons, practicing Islam is expensive.
A Bible here costs $5.45, while a Quran goes for $7.25 — even though it has fewer pages. The rosary used by Catholics sells for $1.65, while Muslims are charged $6.95 for prayer beads. And a satin kippah associated with Jewish adherents costs less than half of a Muslim kufi head covering.
In state and federal prisons in the U.S., about 9% of people identify as Muslim. Whether intentional or not, prisoners tend to have fewer options to purchase Islamic religious items than non-Islamic items, and the ones they can buy often cost more.
At the time of publication, the Tennessee Department of Corrections had not responded to a request for comment for this story.
I was curious about the author so I googled him and his story is wild.
Arrested for armed robbery at 18. Did ten years in state prison where he started writing for a prisoners’ rights newsletter. After release in 1999, he became a prominent activist, even advising the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015.
Then he was caught breaking in to a prison that was under construction and hiding guns and tools in the walls, doing $250,000 worth of damage. He claims they were for his own use, to prevent being raped if he is sent to prison again. Cops also found assault rifles, body armor, and a grenade launcher in his home.
So now he’s doing 40 years for felony vandalism.
Oh, and he has articles about throwing poop and farting etiquette
Like, how and when throwing poop is… okay?
Supply and demand, probably. Sometimes it’s really not that deep.
There are way more Muslim prisoners than Jewish prisoners, so there’s something else at play making kippahs cheaper than Kufis.
That’s how supply and demand works. If there are more Muslims wanting to buy kufis, than Jewish wanting to buy kippahs, the kufis will be more expensive than the kippahs. And add that there is no competition when selling in prisons (aka monopoly) and the price goes up in orders of magnitude.
Yeah, I was thinking about economies of scale and bulk discounts. In that case, the Catholic rosaries should cost more than the Muslim prayer beads.
My first thought was more along the lines of subsidizing. I know a lot of christian groups will give away bibles. My second is quality. I know catholic rosaries can be made pretty cheapy plastic and there is no real requirements around it besides its basic form. That being said I have (or at least had as I would have to look around for it) a paperback koran and it was cheap both in price and quality.
This is the right answer. The board of prisons could make or contract their own crap-quality versions of all these things, in an effort to make all prices the same. But that baseline price would have to be higher. Economies of scale.
