Commodity, Scarcity and Power in the Carceral Economy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21373136 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dwayne Antojado (0000-0001-8142-227X, UniSA Online, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 586-605 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Prison Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0032-8855 • E-ISSN: 1552-7522 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00328855251374902 |
| OpenAlex | W4414112485 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 55 |
An interrogation of the economic dimensions of carceral spaces reveals how everyday commodities, including toiletries, food, and clothing, are mobilized within prisons. Drawing on a substantial body of literature that illustrates the porous boundaries between carceral institutions and broader capitalist economies, this article demonstrates how deprivation, institutional regulation, and entrepreneurial agency intertwine to produce a vibrant internal economy. By exploring “buy-up” practices alongside the symbolic and functional roles of material possessions in prison life in Australia, the analysis illuminates the ways incarcerated individuals navigate scarcity, establish social hierarchies, and assert identity within confinement. In doing so, the prison economy emerges as a critical lens through which to understand not only the material conditions of incarceration but also the broader socio-economic structures and cultural logics that shape the lives of those within the carceral milieu
Agency (philosophy) · Identity (music) · Mass incarceration · Power (physics) · Prison · Scarcity · Structure and agency · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
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A Self‐Regulatory Model of Resource Scarcity
Money and Exchange
Lived experience to lived experience expertise
Cell's Kitchen
Embodying Punishment
The Philosophy of Money
Nothing About Us Without Us”
Prison Drug Dealing and the Ethnographic Lens
The Prison Firm
Depth, weight, tightness
A culture of sharing’
Surviving austerity
Prisoner reintegration and the stigma of prison time inscribed on the body
The Prison Bust
Calories, commerce, and culture
Autoethnography as a Transformative Research Method
Leaving behind the ‘total institution’? Teeth, transcarceral spaces and (re)inscription of the formerly incarcerated body
Carceral economies of migration control
Redeeming desistance
The New Jim Crow
The new politics and geographies of scarcity
Prisoner Society in an Era of Psychoactive Substances, Organized Crime, New Drug Markets and Austerity
The practice of everyday life
The good lives model and conceptual issues in offender rehabilitation
Precarious Work and its Complicit Network
Barter and Economic Disintegration
Prison Research From the Inside
Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources
Between a Promise and a Salary
On the Underdevelopment of the 'Sociology of Money
The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement
Common cents
Prisons as porous institutions
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |