There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That's when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.
When I was studying economics in college, we actually studied how prisoners used cigarettes to create a money supply. From an economist perspective, anything can be used as money just so long as society feels it is a safe store of value, and people are willing to accept it as currency.
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