In a surprising move, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections has become the first state prison system in America to sell vapes to the people it locks up. Inmates now have the ability to procure sealed disposables and nicotine pouches, available through the canteen, paid for out of their inmate accounts.
Cigarettes have been banned inside Oklahoma prisons since 2006, and they remain banned. The state has not suddenly gone soft on tobacco, they might argue. Instead, it has gone into the vape business.
The devices are made by a company named (wait for it) Jail Puff Max. The vape sells for eleven dollars fifty, while the pouches go for ten fifty. According to Oklahoma Watch, which reported the numbers, that eleven-fifty is more than many prisoners earn in a full eight-hour working day.
With a highly captive customer, a single approved supplier, and a price set above a day of labor, business-school professors all over America must be doffing their collective caps at the stunning entrepreneurial foresight.
The Reasoning
The official case is refreshingly free of euphemism. Justin Farris, who runs the department, explained it in four words that no polished consultant would have permitted him to say. “Debt equals violence in prison.” Contraband tobacco creates debts. Debts create leverage. Leverage creates stabbings. If the state sells nicotine at the canteen, so the theory goes, the black market that supplies it loses its reason to exist, and with it the debts and the violence it feeds on.
As theories go, it is not quite as mad as it sounds. Last year, the department seized over sixteen hundred pounds of tobacco and arrested eighty-three people for smuggling it, including forty-two visitors and fourteen of its own staff. A decade of prohibition has produced a thriving internal economy in exactly the thing prohibition was designed to remove. Oklahoma presumably looked at that result and concluded with no shortage of glee that if it could not beat the dealers, it would undercut them.
Perfect Target Market
By the same token, a retired professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, takes an alternative view, pointing out that tobacco companies have spent decades trying to get back inside prisons, which offer what he called a captive audience that is disproportionately poor and prone to addiction.
It is, at least from a purely commercial standpoint, the ideal storefront. Nobody browses or comparison shops, after all, and very few actually leave, unless they are springing over a wall.
Oklahoma might argue that it has not exactly let the industry back in, but rather has done something cleaner. It has appointed itself the dealer, removed the competition, and kept the margin. The same institution that employs you, houses you, and decides when you eat now also sells you the nicotine, at a price you cannot negotiate, from a supplier you cannot switch. Bravo, it must be said.
The policy even extends to staff. Corrections officers, who are not permitted smoke breaks across a twelve-hour shift, may now buy and use the same products on duty. So the guard and the guarded are, for the first time in a decade, level with one another, both topping up from the same canteen, in a sense, forbidden the cigarette that started all of this.
Freedom
Of course, it is worth remembering what an adult on the outside actually has, because the prison version throws it into relief. A free person is not handed a sealed single-use device by the institution that controls their day. He walks into an open market, picks whatever hardware he likes, and buys his refills from any vape superstore that will have him, with no warden’s approval required.
He refills it himself. He is trusted to manage his own nicotine without a warden, a markup, or a single approved brand. Those of us spared the four walls of a prison cell probably forget that freedom is mostly the boring privilege of choosing your own bottle.
Oklahoma spent ten years fighting a war on nicotine and lost it to the very people it had locked up. While the cigarettes stay banned, the vapes sit on the canteen shelf, and for the inmates, it is a remarkable victory.
