By Bill Littlefield
“Eating Behind Bars” is a necessary if incomplete cry for justice. It earns its place among the growing number of books exposing this country’s shameful treatment of incarcerated men and women.
Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison by Leslie Soble with Alex Busansky and Aishatu R. Yusuf. Impact Justice/The New Press, 209 pages, paperback.
“Prisons serve mostly ultra-processed carb-heavy meals high in salt and sugar, with few or no fresh fruits and vegetables and a scarcity of quality protein.”
Why?
Feeding a lot of people is easier if you provide packaged, “ultra-processed” meals which can be stored for a long time and that require minimal skill for their preparation.
Wardens, governors, and other prison and jail administrators like “cheap.” Sometimes that’s because they have limited budgets. Sometimes it’s because what they don’t spend on food they can pocket. This goes double for private prisons.
Few outside the prisons and jails object to the low quality of the food in the institutions. Many people outside of these institutions don’t see why those inside should eat well. They’re incarcerated, after all. What do they expect? Surf and turf? (The carceral system encourages society’s demonization of people in prisons and jails, a mindset that creates a problem extending well beyond what sustenance is provided there.)
Incarcerated men and women hoping to augment their meager fare must deal with several challenges. Strict rules in some states prevent relatives from bringing in food for incarcerated folks. Food — mostly snacks — offered at the canteens in the prisons is far more expensive than it would cost in convenience stores. Some institutions even prohibit the sharing of food inside or outside the mess halls.
Eating Behind Bars catalogues these circumstances. The authors also cite programs that have successfully addressed them: organizations such as Chefs in Prisons, which not only demonstrate inexpensive and effective ways to provide healthy food, but also train incarcerated men and women in the field of food preparation so they might be able to find employment upon release. The authors also argue that several states, most notably Maine and California, have made some progress in developing nutritious and appealing meals for incarcerated people.
The arguments in favor of this encouraging move toward caring for prisoners’ well-being are numerous and compelling. Supplying food that people can actually eat means less waste. Providing food that enables incarcerated people to remain healthy — rather than developing diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, or other diet-related conditions — means the men and women leaving prison aren’t sick when they leave prison or don’t end up dependent on state-provided health care. Programs that teach incarcerated folks how to grow and harvest healthy food for their own consumption teach useful skills that can lead to future careers. The latter merit is not to be confused with the practice in some states of using incarcerated people to harvest crops that are sold for consumption by others, a practice that is sometimes indistinguishable from sharecropping or slavery.
Prison meals often lack fresh fruit and vegetables. Photo: X
The bad news in Eating Behind Bars is that, in many states, incarcerated men and women are being served “food” that is tasteless, often spoiled, sometimes contaminated with animal matter, and unpalatable in myriad other ways.
The good news is that, thanks to organizations like Impact Justice and more-or-less enlightened officials in a few states, these inhumane and costly conditions are being addressed, at least on a limited basis. Justice and compassion demand more. Justice and mercy demand more and, of course, a book limited to concerns about what incarcerated men and women are given to eat doesn’t address other practices that make incarceration so destructive. Still, in other contexts, formerly incarcerated men have written eloquently about how depressing and degrading it is to be served inedible meals or given so little food that they are left constantly hungry. Some have accepted hunger as a challenge, something to endure and overcome. Others have resorted to methods of securing food that people unfamiliar with the realities of incarceration in this country will find hard to believe. For example, “fishing,” in which someone with access to snack food from the prison canteen wraps it in waterproof paper and sends it to the recipient through the same plumbing system that carries waste from the facility.
Eating Behind Bars is a necessary if incomplete cry for justice. It earns its place among the growing number of books exposing this country’s shameful treatment of incarcerated men and women.
Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent book is Who Taught That Mouse To Write? (Writing Mouse Press)