Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain made an extraordinary announcement on December 23, noting:
- For the first time in 10 years, Mississippi prison inmates who smoke will be able to do so legally, beginning February 1, 2021.
- Name brand cigarettes, cigars and smokeless tobacco products will be sold at current prices in prison canteens, along with snacks and toiletries.
- Inmates who smoke are smoking anyway, but they’re having to smuggle in tobacco to do it.
Cain reported that the ban has forced inmates to pay “as much as $500 a pound” for cigarette tobacco. The new policy, he said, “will save [them] money and the state will make money,” and, “By selling [cigarettes], we are breaking the contraband tobacco trade, designating smoking areas outside, clearing the air inside for the majority of inmates who don’t smoke, reducing inmate contraband violations, and recouping for taxpayers some of the dollars it takes to run prisons.”
Profits from tobacco sales will fund the system’s re-entry program and its high school and college credit courses.
This announcement will be criticized by tobacco prohibitionists, but it portends the widespread reversal of almost two decades of tobacco prohibition in American prison systems. I predicted the disastrous consequences and ultimate failure of such prohibition in a 2004 Las Vegas Review Journal op-ed, reprinted below.
