A captive market: pocket radios with clear cases for prisoners

You may find market niches that you had never imagined. This year at eBay I bought a used DT-110 pocket radio (shown above) made by a Taiwanese electronics company called Sangean. When I looked for a detailed instruction manual to download, I found a web page showing another version with a clear case (DT110CL) and nine other ‘correctional’ radios whose transparent cases would stop contraband like drugs from being hidden. The most deluxe was the MMR-77, which was designed as an emergency portable with a built-in rechargeable battery and a hand-cranked dynamo for charging it. That model also shows up on the radios web page for the Bob Barker Company.  

A web page titled Mass Incarceration: The whole pie 2018 from the Prison Policy Initiative says that there are about 2.3 million prisoners in the United States. In The New Yorker on January 10, 2014 there was an article by Joshua Hunt titled The iPod of prison about these little headphone radios powered by one or two AAA batteries. He discussed the Sony SRF-39FP, which has analog tuning. Amazon shows a similar $15 Jensen MR-50 (described as being slightly smaller than a pack of playing cards). I imagine any of these radios would help relieve the boredom of being confined.     

The image of cells in the old Idaho state penitentiary came from Eric Friedebach at Wikimedia Commons.