The first time I spoke to him he was bent over a garbage can throwing up with a group of inmates standing around him laughing. He had just snorted a spoonful of habanero sauce for the prize of a ramen noodle. I asked him why on Earth he would do that. Without looking up he smiled and proudly declared in his thick accent. “It’s my hustle, man!”

For clarification I asked, “Snorting things or doing stupid stuff for money?” He turned his head to look at me and replied. “Both.” That is when my buddy Jeff jumped in and said, “Great! Wanna make some money?” We paid him $3 to shave off his eyebrows and an additional 50 cents to draw new ones on himself with red permanent marker.

In prison a “hustle” is anything someone does in order to “come up” with or earn money. Everybody has one and almost all of them are against the rules. Selling anything from arts and crafts to prescription medication is a typical hustle as well as doing work for others such as laundry or school assignments.

My celly is a tattoo artist, sports bookie, and a “store.” This means he loans items out and collects their value plus 30 percent, the very next week. That’s one heck of an APR! Fortunately for my celly, his customers did not get here by making good decisions. Those are some of the more lucrative hustles, but his enterprise was recently busted. Now he just sells his artwork and makes money playing cards.

Up to this point my only hustle has been poker. I’ve repeatedly been warned against gambling in prison, but so far it has taken care of me for the better part of a year. Of course for us to consistently make money someone has to consistently lose it. The majority of those who fit into that category have people on the outside sending them money.

Though we do have this one guy who has to hustle inside for everything. He then turns around and throws it away at the poker table. The money he loses nightly is provided by his girlfriend. This sugar mama also happens to be his celly, and therein lies his hustle. He can’t do my hustle and I definitely couldn’t do his. Not every hustle is for every person.

Another example of this is a guy in our section who sells breakfast, lunch and dinner every day if he can. He doesn’t starve, though. In fact, he has gained somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 pounds in the last six months because he stands next to the garbage and eats all the stuff that would’ve been thrown away.

Each section is its own community with its own economy and we all fit somewhere in it. When I first arrived in this section I was in need of a haircut. I was directed to the services of an inmate rather than the state-paid barber. The cost was roughly the same when you factor in the price of the razor you must provide, but this way the money stays in house. For the most part, inmates try to help each other out. Nobody here has to go without shampoo or deodorant; however, they may need to snort hot sauce or eat other people’s garbage to get it.

Brian Wood, formerly of Layton, is an inmate at the Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison.