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Commissary Economics: Who Profits?

Matt Stiles at the Texas Tribune recently focused on "Buyers Behind Bars," creating an excellent interactive graphic showing what Texas prison inmates spend their money on.Adding to that dataset on commissaries, I was interested to stumble onto a report at the Comptroller's www.texastransparency.org website that tells which companies benefited from inmate commissary sales. Go to this page to search spending by agency. Choose "Texas Department of Criminal Justice" for the agency and, say, 2009 for the fiscal year, the most recent complete one. (The app loads slowly on my computer, but works well once you pull the data down.) A page comes up portraying TDCJ's $3.4 billion budget for 2009 in broad categories, including "Cost of Goods Sold."Drilling down, we discover that TDCJ spent $66,031,430...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on May 17, 2010 (boomark / email).