The Michigan State prison also offers many programs, even approved college courses, long distance by mail seminary classes, Bible studies, paid jobs in the prison, etc. Except for the electric woven-wire fence, which keeps you in, (which is depressing) it can be a good place for improvement for ones life and horizons, depending one ones attitude. This is one of the areas “Us Lepers” can be of help.

We cannot bring anything into jail or prison, although the one exception we found was eyeglasses. You can of course write, but be sure to check the limitations, you can only send a certain amount of pages at one time, and these can only be written, printed or copied pages. No booklets, books, stamps, envelopes or anything of value such as money. Books, etc. including Bibles can be sent through an approved book store, no foreign language material can be sent except previously approved, approval will depend on if some one in the mail room can read it.

Prisoners do not have any money inside the prison. They have a barter system of which a bar of soap has the most value. You can buy (barter) for anything you want in prison; this includes drugs, sex (probably the grossest kind), etc. Most of the illegal items are brought in by guards, but also by friends or family. How does this illegal activity get done without money? Someone on the outside is paying for the drugs and paying off the guards to deliver it, either by profit or blackmail. There is money in the prisons, but it is controlled by the State. Each inmate has an account that family members, or anyone can put money into it. The inmate usually has some kind of job that pays about 17 cents per hour and that goes into their account. Some family members put money into the account monthly. The inmate can select from a catalog, up to his maximum account total. They can buy items such as clothing, food items (junk food) personal items, light meds, etc. Even though an inmate does not have any money (many don’t) they do receive all he is in need of for free, but his wants come from his account. The barter system is quite interesting! Everyone has a foot-locker (bank) under his bed, which he stores all his items in. I know of one inmate that had two lockers and many times he would take inventory and count his booty, just as we do with our bank accounts. There are no locks in prison; but the population takes care for each other’s property. The only way anyone can put money into an inmates account, is through “J-Pay”.  The cost of each transaction is a minimum of $3.00, and can only be done by credit card. If you give $10.00, the inmate will receive $7.00. See link at bottom of this page. You can also avoid the fee by mailing  a money order or cashiers check to JPAY. You will need an order form which you can print from,

http://www.jpay.com/moneyOrderForms/MI_Money_Order_coupon.pdf

Instead of using mail to communicate you can now email and the inmate can email back. This is very good; usually the inmate will get it the next day, where mail takes 3 – 6 days. This cost is 50 cents per page, but the problem for the inmate is that they have a limited time to type their letter and most people can’t get a half page typed in the given time. Many prisoners don’t know, but they can save their first given time of writing and come back later and continue to write and send. They can only do this one time. We can write the letter first into “Word” and copy and paste into Pay Pal.

“J-PAY” which is used to put money on the inmates account, and to email the inmate.       http://www.jpay.com/