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Instant ramen: It's warm, flavorful, quick, cheap, and filling.
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It's the chosen favorite among college kids and inmates across America.
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Check usage reports from the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, for example, and you'll see that ramen was the number one sold item at prison commissaries.
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Ramen has become like "cash" among American prisoners.
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Because behind bars, it can buy you anything.
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Anything; anything that's got any value, from clothes, drugs, uh, a favor.
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"Hey, I like the way your penmanship is, can you write this letter for me?", "Can you draw this for me?"⏤you know, anything.
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It's... it's literally gold.
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This is Gustavo "Goose" Alvarez.
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After 13 years in and out of prison, he literally wrote the book on "Prison Ramen".
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Ramen is the best and easiest currency because everybody uses it.
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Every⏤that's everybody's staple to cook; you gotta have ramen.
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Because prisoners can't possess cash, they use objects to trade for other goods and services.
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And anything that replaces cash has to be durable, portable, divisible into standardized units, and highly valued.
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Ramen fits the bill because, unlike other traded objects like stamps, which are expensive, and tobacco, which is banned in most prisons, ramen is cheap and easy to get a hold of.
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In the commissary, a single pack of ramen runs about 59 cents on average.
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But once it's out of the official commissary, ramen's value is determined by an informal prison economy.
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They barter with it, they become jailhouse stores, so to speak, like, guys would purchase all the ramen, kind of like that scene in "Orange Is The New Black".
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She took over the market.
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Jesus, who bought all the ramens?
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Guys fill up their shelves with this and they have their own store and then they put their price on it.
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Your ramen could sell for 2 to 3 dollars, believe it or not.
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A 2016 study found that while a sweatshirt cost 10 dollars and 81 cents at the commissary at Sunbelt State Penitentiary, an inmate could sell that sweatshirt for 2 packs of ramen, increasing the value of ramen by 916 percent.
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In fact, food items are the overwhelming majority of what people buy.
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An analysis of annual commissary sales in three states shows that 75 percent of spending was entirely on food and beverages.
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Inmates aren't just using ramen as cash; they're also eating it.
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Creative cooking in prison is a necessity.
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When asked if prison meals were enough to live off of, Alvarez said,
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No, I... I think you would starve. Literally.
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I lost, like, ten pounds, you know, because they give you a... a meal that's maybe for a 5-year-old, a 10-year-old.
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But it wasn't up to par, it wasn't your "4 food groups"⏤ it was none of that.
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So, ramen can supplement when the food provided isn't enough.
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With 2.3 million people in US prisons and pressure to cut costs, food is one area where federal and state governments are trying to save money.
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Some inmates are now being fed for as little as a dollar, 77 cents a meal.
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In one instance, the Marshall Project reported that one prison that had whittled down costs to as low as 56 cents a meal.
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But keeping food costs low doesn't come without consequences.
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Aramark, a private food vendor to over 600 correctional facilities, has been cited for giving inmates tainted food and serving fewer and smaller meals.
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New information tonight about ongoing problems with maggots found in Ohio prison kitchens.
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Issues like this with Aramark and other private food vendors have prompted civil lawsuits and protests in response to the state of food.
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Turns out, food isn't just about nutrition; it's also about security.
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Despite everything, ramen has become a way inmates keep a sense of control while in the system.
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We would actually make a humongous spread.
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And these soups would be the equalizer for all of us to sit down and have a meal, you know, and... and not stress on what's happening on the prison yard.
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Trade and bartering in prison isn't new, but until there are systemic changes in its food system, ramen will likely stay at the top of the prison trade economy.
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Simply because food is a basic need.
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And ramen is a basic solution.
