Shaka Senghor: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the most common medium of exchange in prison? You mentioned doing these deals. What’s the central item traded? Is it dollars? Is it cigarettes? When I first went in, it was cigarettes. Cigarettes was pretty much the most steady currency. Then that was taken out because they banned cigarette smoking in prisons. Then stamps became the currency because you could send stamps to the free world and have your family exchange that for currency. And then it becomes food and cosmetics. So soap has value in prison — you can trade that off for food and things like that. Everything has currency, and it’s one of the things that’s interesting about the environment. When you think about the history of currency in the world, where back in the day, you just bartered and you exchanged things, and the same thing happens in prison. What I learned from that is that money is only based on the idea behind it and what value you assign to the idea behind the particular form of currency you choose to exchange. And the same thing is in prison. The individuals who are incarcerated — what are their senses of humor like? Is it different on the inside or just the same? Are they funnier?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.