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BUYING A CELL OF MY OWN

untouchable. They just lock up the small fry like us to make it look like they're cleaning up the country. There are people in prison for two grams, and others who weren't even caught with anything. Just on suspicion.' He banged his fist on the table to emphasise his point and the wood shavings from his supply and demand graphs jumped out of their grooves. 'So, you see, that's why we Bolivians hate the Americans,' he concluded in his New York accent.

I could see that Ricardo was capable of talking about American politics for hours, but I wanted to get back to the subject of buying my room, so I cut in before he could continue.

'I get it. So, if the prices are always going up, that means I should buy as soon as possible before it gets more expensive. Right?'

'Not necessarily,' Ricardo the politician went back to being Ricardo the wise economist. He stroked his chin and drew back on his 'cigar' as though he had just been asked a very controversial question by a clever journalist and needed time to formulate his response. Of course, I could tell that he had already thought about these things a lot and was simply enjoying the opportunity to show off his knowledge. In fact, he was loving every minute of it and stringing it out for as long as possible. Or maybe he was just getting his revenge because I had interrupted him just as he was getting to an important point about the Americans. He repeated very slowly, 'Not necessarily, my friend.'

Occasionally, room prices did actually go down, he explained. There were two things that could cause this; the first was when more people were leaving prison than were entering. This occurred when a lot of prisoners were pardoned or given early release, which meant there were more vacancies and so the cell market went down. This happened by pure necessity when the prison was full and the administration used any excuse to reduce the number of prisoners. That was easy enough to understand. In fact, I later experienced the biggest example of this first hand when a new law called Extra Muro – 'Extra Wall' – was passed, which halved the sentences of most prisoners in the country. This law led to hundreds of prisoners becoming eligible for immediate or early release.

The second reason was what Ricardo called 'market scare'. Frequently, the Bolivian government announced plans to pull down San Pedro prison and transfer all the inmates to a new jail it wanted