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The reason (the only reasonable one o can come up with) is the added cost of inspection before selling them.

I don't disagree that the mark up mentioned in the post was extreme, but I don't have a good idea of what it would be otherwise.

Based on my having visited places with high tariffs, or a difficult place to deliver things (top of a mountain) you definitely see large markups. Not 6x, but 2x-3x isn't uncommon.

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> the added cost of inspection before selling them.

I wouldn't expect the supplier to bear this cost; it's the jailers who are doing the inspecting.

> or a difficult place to deliver things (top of a mountain) you definitely see large markups. Not 6x, but 2x-3x isn't uncommon.

But surely they aren't charging 2x-3x more because they need to make profit, but because it's justifiable for them to charge 2x-3x more (mostly due to lack of competition).

However, profiting from prisoners by exploiting artificially restricted competition seems rather unethical to me.

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