Joshua B. Hoe interviews Mika Weinstein and Leslie Soble about food in prison
Full Episode
My Guests: Mika Weinstein and Leslie Soble
Mika Weinstein has managed the Impact Justice Food in Prison Project since its inception in summer 2018, overseeing the organization’s efforts to undertake the first national assessment of prison food. Mika graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oregon in 2014 with a degree in planning, public policy, and management.
Leslie Soble joined Impact Justice in the fall of 2018 as a research fellow for the Food in Prison Project. An educator and ethnographer, Leslie is the founder and artistic director of Story Soup, a project that creates contexts for dialogue across cultural and generational borders through food and narrative. She has over a decade of experience designing and facilitating cultural competency workshops to explore identity, systems of oppression, and intercultural/intergenerational communication. Leslie holds a B.A. in gender studies from Brown University and an M.A. in cultural sustainability from Goucher College.
Notes from Episode 92 Mika Weinstein and Lesie Soble
You can find Impact Justice on their website.
Mika and Leslie’s report is “Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison”
The full citation for the report is:
Soble, L., Stroud, K., & Weinstein, M. (2020). Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison. Impact Justice. impactjustice.org/impact/food-in-prison/#report
Full Transcript
Joshua B. Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 92 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Leslie Sobel and Mika Weinstein of Impact Justice about their new report on food in prison.
Mika Weinstein has managed the Impact Justice Food in Prison project since its inception in summer of 2018, overseeing the organization’s effort to undertake the first national assessment of prison food. Mika graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oregon in 2014 with a degree in Planning, Public Policy and Management.
Leslie Soble joined Impact Justice in the fall of 2018 as a Research Fellow for the Food in Prison project. An educator and ethnographer, Leslie is the Founder and Artistic Directof of Story Soup, a project that creates context for dialogue across cultural and generational borders through food and narrative. She has over a decade of experience designing and facilitating cultural competency workshops to explore identity, systems of oppression and intercultural, intergenerational communication. Leslie holds a BA in Gender Studies from Brown University and an MA in Cultural Sustainability from Goucher College.
We’re here to discuss their report, Eating Behind Bars, Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison, which was put out by Impact Justice recently.
Welcome to the Decarceration Nation podcast, Mika and Leslie!
Mika Weinstein
Thank you so much, Josh. We’re happy to be here.
Leslie Soble
Thank you.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same first question. How did you get from where you started out in life – kind of the origin question – to where you find yourselves writing a report on food in prisons? Either one of you can start.
Mika Weinstein
I can start; this is Mika talking. I went to the University of Oregon, as you mentioned, and there’s a program there – have you heard of Inside Out, Josh?
Josh Hoe
Yes.
Mika Weinstein
So for listeners who may not be familiar, it’s an educational program that brings university students into prisons to take classes with people who are incarcerated there. And as a freshman at the University of Oregon, I took an Inside Out class, a fantastic geography class. And it totally shifted the orientation of my career. Even then, I was interested in a number of different social justice issues. But there was something about spending time with, forming relationships with folks inside that really drove home this idea and point that our criminal legal system as it is set up now doesn’t make sense. It’s not helping create more safety in our society. And that sort of set my personal trajectory towards caring about changing the way that our criminal legal system works. Simultaneous to that, I have always been interested in food and food justice. I think Leslie and I both share this in some ways – my life revolves around food, I’m constantly thinking about what I’m going to eat next. The way that I show care for my friends is cooking for them, right. And so . . .
Josh Hoe
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I kind of love food.
Mika Weinstein
So it was natural, this interest in the nexus of these two issues. And on the Impact Justice side, I’ve been working with the organization for three and a half years now. And most of my work is with a project that’s focused on preventing sexual abuse and sexual harassment in confinement agencies. But the President of our organization Alex, a few years ago noticed that there was a gap in the field in this area. He knew that I had some background working with a food justice organization prior to Impact Justice and asked if I wanted to do some research to find out who’s working on this issue, what’s already being done. And not surprisingly, there was very little, there’s very little happening in that space already. And we decided that prior to trying to do some kind of intervention ourselves, it was important to really understand the landscape. And that was the impetus for us launching the study that turned into this very long report that you mentioned.
Josh Hoe
And what about you, Leslie?
Leslie Soble
So my path is a little different because this is really my first foray into the justice reform space. I grew up in a family that’s very obsessed with food, and food was the lens through which I learned how to see and understand the world. And I was always very involved with different food justice movements. And when I went to grad school, I chose to study culture through the lens of food. And I actually had a really interesting conversation during one of my grad school classes with someone who was doing a lot around decarceration and prison abolition. And I remember talking with her and saying, Yeah, it’d be really interesting to look at how people interact with food in the prison space; how they still communicate identity and communicate with other people through food, and then [I] just sort of tucked that away. In the back of my mind, it wasn’t anything that I ever thought that I’d get to, at any point, or so quickly. Fast forward just a couple years, and I saw a posting on Idealist for a nonprofit organization that was looking to do a study of food in prisons. And I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting. You know, I’d be intrigued to see what would come of this, and to look at not just the impacts of food on physical health, but also on mental health and emotional well-being and how [food] impacts people’s ability to interact with others, both in and outside of the prison setting. You know, how it impacts people’s sense of human dignity. And really look at this from a different variety of angles. And so I sent in a cover letter, and Mika contacted me a few hours later, and here I am.
Josh Hoe
That’s pretty cool. Just so people know – since both of you work there, either one of you can answer this one – what is Impact Justice?
Mika Weinstein
Impact Justice is a national research and innovation center; we are trying to create a justice system that is humane, restorative and fair, and we have projects that focus on three different areas. We have projects that focus on diversion – so trying to prevent people from coming into contact with the justice system to begin with. We have projects that focus on conditions of confinement – so trying to improve the quality of lives for people who are currently incarcerated. And then we have projects that are focused on supporting successful reentry.
Josh Hoe
So you already mentioned how the project got started, that the person who runs Impact Justice saw there was a hole in their coverage. But was that the genesis of this? What happened to cause the report?
Mika Weinstein
Yeah, so like you said, Alex recognized that there is this gap; we hear from people who are incarcerated all the time about the various issues around conditions inside, and food is a common complaint. But a lot of the resources and attention, understandably, focus on solitary confinement, on ending the death penalty, on trying to improve access to medical care, and all of those issues do deserve attention, of course. But considering how profoundly the quality and quantity of food affects the everyday lives of people who are incarcerated – not just while they’re incarcerated, but also after they leave – we think that this issue merits a lot more attention than it’s gotten in the past. And like I mentioned before, we wanted to make sure that any kind of future intervention project idea that we generated was really grounded in a deep understanding of how the system currently operates. And that’s why we started with a research element of the project.
Josh Hoe
And it sounds like both of you, from what I heard earlier, have a background and an interest in food. How much did you have to educate yourselves in things like nutritional requirements and needs, or public dietary health and things like that when you were getting started?
Leslie Soble
We came in with a pretty decent knowledge of these things, partly just because Mika and I are both so deeply interested in food and have done work in food justice spaces. I’m not a registered dietitian. But at the same time, I do have many years studying food from a cultural perspective, but also looking at the basic nutritional aspect of things. So, a lot of those basics we already understood, but also I don’t think that it takes a registered dietician to be able to look at the issue of food in prison and to recognize that it isn’t particularly healthy.
Josh Hoe
One of the things you say in the report is that prisons are out-of-sight food deserts. Mika, what I would say happens in our prisons usually happens in “darkness”, that they’re kind of by design black boxes. How were you able to penetrate the black box and get the information in this very detailed report?
Mika Weinstein
We used a mixture of methods. My first instinct is actually that there’s so much information that we still were not able to get access to. I agree that through literally years of effort, we were able to compile what I think is probably the most comprehensive report on prison food in America. But even then, you know, of course, we couldn’t just walk into a facility on a given day without any sort of heads up and see what food was being served there. So we relied on the people who we consider the foremost experts, which are folks who have experienced incarceration themselves; we surveyed and talked to many people who have been incarcerated. And then we also used some connections and networks to talk directly with folks who work in corrections. And we were able to interview dozens of people who work in corrections. We were able to visit several facilities across the country, mostly in facilities where they’re proud of what they’re doing, right. A lot of folks in corrections take pride in the work that they’re doing, and want to be able to share that with people on the outside. And then I think a final element to this is that these are publicly-run institutions. And so while we don’t have the leeway or license to go in of our own accord, there is certain information that we are entitled to as citizens, as taxpayers that we can leverage. And that’s an area that – when at the end, I’m sure we’ll talk about how folks can get involved or what they can do. Asking for more transparency or information from these institutions that are publicly-funded is something that folks can do.
Josh Hoe
And how completely were you able to investigate? Like, how many states were you able to cover? How good of a feel did you get for the national picture?
Mika Weinstein
We had at least some information, even if it was just looking at the policies posted on their website, about all 50 states, [but] the level of detail and depth really varied. We did put out a survey through the Correctional Leadership Association that about 35 state correctional agencies responded to; like I said, we interviewed folks in, I think, a dozen states. And we tried to focus on geographic diversity, so we were not only getting answers from the same size states or same geographic areas. If you asked about a certain state, the information we have may be limited. But I think that we covered enough ground that we were able to make some generalizations about the true crisis that is happening around food in prisons across the country.
Josh Hoe
Leslie, I know personally, as a formerly incarcerated person, that one of the things I worry about when I’m dealing directly with people who are still inside, is putting them at risk. How did you deal with the questions of how to interact with folks inside to protect them and stop them from, for instance, retaliation and things like that.
Leslie Soble
We were very careful to make sure that we were protecting people’s privacy. In the actual report itself, we don’t identify any of the formerly incarcerated or incarcerated people we spoke with; we use pseudonyms, and we don’t identify the states in which we spoke to them. So it would be pretty hard to track down any of those people. I think that was one of the things that was really at the top of our minds, was making sure that we were keeping the folks who were talking to us safe.
Josh Hoe
Your report starts with the following statement: “A person sentenced to prison in the United States serves 3 years on average, that’s more than 3000 meals behind bars, far more for people serving longer sentences, all typically high in salt, sugar, and refined carbohydrates and low and essential nutrients – a diet that for decades, everyone else has been advised to avoid.” I myself literally served three years, so I guess I had those 3000 meals, and I certainly agree with your assessment of the quality. I know our Department of Corrections would say that they have a nutritionist to approve the menus. But how seriously should we take that statement when they would even post things on the walls at the prison, I remember, that would have the nutritional breakdowns. You know, where’s the disconnect happening? What are we missing?
Leslie Soble
So I think there are a number of places where there’s a disconnect there. First of all, we talked to a number of correctional dieticians and several of them told us that although they technically approve the menus, they’re basically putting a rubber stamp on the menus and saying, this particular menu meets the nutritional policies of this particular state; it doesn’t mean that they actually personally approve of it as someone who has a professional nutrition background. I think that’s the first disconnect there. The second is that the dietitians look at the menus; they’re not necessarily looking at the food that actually ends up being served, which number one, could be completely different than what’s on the menus, because there’s a huge gap between policy and practice. And number two, food changes over time. So when food is cooked and heated and stored – potentially for years at a time – and then reheated and potentially reheated again, as it gets to a unit, if it’s being transferred – the nutritional quality of that food can change certain vitamins and minerals, [and result in] a decrease in amount and decrease in quality. So, you know, the dietitians or the nutritionists who are looking at these menus aren’t looking at the nutritional quality of the food that is necessarily actually being eaten.
Josh Hoe
And what you found – at least from my reading of it – is that a lot of people are not necessarily providing what actually ends up being nutritional food. Is that correct?
Leslie Soble
Yeah, that’s correct. And some of it is that the food that’s being served isn’t particularly nutrient dense; there aren’t a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables or high quality proteins; there are a lot of carbs, a lot of what we would call empty calories. And so sometimes the nutritional aspect comes from these packets of a fortified beverage mix, they’re kind of like a Kool Aid or a fruit-flavored beverage that you add to water. And so that’s where a lot of the nutrients, the technical nutrients, are coming from in prison food. And I think the other thing to point out is that a lot of the food that gets served on the prison tray isn’t necessarily edible. And so people aren’t getting those nutrients, because they also aren’t necessarily eating the food. So between not being able to actually stomach the food that’s on the tray, and being expected to get a lot of your nutrients from that fortified beverage packet, which a lot of people say they also don’t drink because it tastes very chemically. And people talked about using it as hair dye rather than as an actual beverage. So the combination of that, plus the concept that you shouldn’t be getting all of your nutrition from supplements anyways – it’s really best to have nutrient-dense food – all of that combined really makes this an unhealthy experience for people who are getting these meals.
Josh Hoe
You’re bringing back, unfortunately, a lot of memories for me here.
You know in the work that I do I get a lot of pushback, and many people ask things like, why should we care if people in prison get good food? And I have a lot of stock answers to this question. But what answer would each of you have to this question, this notion that people deserve [this], that prison is just desserts – no pun intended – and that if they get bad food, that’s part of the punishment of prison.
Mika Weinstein
My response would be that I would like to think that for the most part, we have this shared goal in society of more safety, health and well-being for everyone, right. And we’ve been fed this argument for a long time that prison serves as a deterrent, punishment serves as a deterrent for people to take part in criminal activity, and that has been shown not to be true. Prison is not an effective deterrent. There are a lot of studies out there that show this. And so if what we really care about is promoting safety, punishing people isn’t going to accomplish that, right? Harm begets more harm. And this issue affects more than just the people who are currently incarcerated. Millions of people cycle through our justice system every year; one in three adult Americans has a family member who has been incarcerated and the vast majority, 95% of people who are in prison right now, are going to be released someday. So ultimately, it’s an issue of community health and well-being that people don’t come out of prison with the kind of chronic health issues that we’re seeing right now.
Leslie Soble
I agree fully with everything Mika just said, and I think I would also add that food sends a message. We use food to communicate value and identity and relationships and we’re sending a message to and about incarcerated people through the food that we give them, and if we’re providing them food that tastes bad and food that doesn’t promote health and well-being, food that is sometimes literally labeled not fit for human consumption, then the message that we’re sending is that these people are not worthy of care, and that they’re not fully human. And like Mika said, one in three adult Americans has a loved one who’s incarcerated. And there are – I think the statistic is over 5.7 million kids – who have experienced the incarceration of a parent. And so sending people these messages that they’re not worthy of care, not only impacts them, but also impacts their family members, their children, and really impacts our society as a whole.
Josh Hoe
At one point in the report, you talk about the history of correctional food provision. I don’t know which one of you has worked more on this part of the report. But what should people listening know about that long history of correctional food provision?
Mika Weinstein
Sure, I can speak to that question, Josh. There are a number of things that are coming into my head. One thing that it’s really important to acknowledge right off the bat is that the history of prisons is closely tied up with the history of food production in this country, not just prison food, but food production on the whole, with ties back to slavery and convict leasing. So for people who aren’t familiar, there was a practice that exploded after the Civil War, called convict leasing, that essentially was a way for plantation owners to continue to profit off of the exploited labor of mostly black men. There was an incentive that was created for black men to be arrested and incarcerated so that the state could sell their labor to private companies, and it wasn’t just plantations or food production. But I think that was a big part of the labor that was happening through that system. And this meant that both private companies and the state were profiting off of this labor. There’s a statistic that we share in the report that in 1898, almost 75% of Alabama’s entire state annual revenue came from convict leasing, so this was big business for the state as well. And some of the prison farms that operate today are on the same land that were former plantations. Convict leasing was outlawed in the early 20th century, but the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery, did make an exception for people who are convicted of a crime, which is why you see people who are incarcerated now working in some states for no wages at all, and some for 25 cents an hour. And it’s really wild and . . .
Josh Hoe
And oddly enough, that amendment, that exception in the 13th Amendment was created as a post-Civil War compromise.
Mika Weinstein
Exactly. So what we have is the situation [that] we’re on the same piece of land, you know, the same few acres, right, you could look back 200 years ago, it may have been enslaved black people who are working on that land, and obviously not getting paid. And then 100 years ago, black men working on that land through convict leasing, not receiving wages, and then today, disproportionately black men working that same land for little or no wages as incarcerated men. I think that is really telling about the ways that white supremacy operates in our society and how systems transform to continue to accommodate the ways that we exploit labor, you know, thinking about the new Jim Crow and others who have observed the way that we continue to adapt our systems to exploit predominantly black people in this country.
Josh Hoe
So 62% – and this really doesn’t surprise me at all having gone through it myself – 62% of the people you interviewed said they never got fresh vegetables, and 54% said they never had access to fresh fruit. So what is the actual makeup – I know we talked about this above with the drinks – of most diets in our prisons? Is there a way to generalize it?
Leslie Soble
I would say that the diet is mostly carbs. We heard from most people that it was a variety of bread and pasta and biscuits and lots of yellow cake and . . .
Josh Hoe
There is a lot of yellow cake, that’s very true!
Leslie Soble
That [mostly carbs] makes up the bulk of the food that’s on the tray. From there, I guess it varies. You might get a few slices of deli meat, some highly over-cooked, over-boiled canned vegetables, some canned fruit or fruit cocktail, things like that. It really does vary from facility to facility and state to state, but I think overall, you can say that the food is carb-heavy, it’s high in sodium, it tends to be high in sugar, it’s very bland, and there’s often not enough of it. So it’s not a healthy diet overall.
Josh Hoe
And again, it’s kind of weird. One of the things that we return to time and time again on this podcast is this notion of short-term versus long-term budgeting. As I understand it from the breakdowns I’ve seen by Prison Policy Initiative and other folks, health care is one of the largest parts of prison budgets, but food is a much smaller portion of prison costs. Could spending more money on food reduce the amount prisons pay for health care?
Mika Weinstein
Absolutely; that’s one of the arguments that we make in our report. It’s very difficult to do academic research in prisons for good reasons – because of the ways that unethical studies have been done in prisons in the past – but there are studies, even in the free world, that show that as an intervention for diabetes, for example, if you actually just pay for the food that people need to eat, [for] healthy meals, that can drastically reduce the healthcare costs. So both within and outside of prison, there’s a lot of opportunity to actually take advantage of that relationship between food and health in a way that not only saves us money, but of course promotes better health and allows people to live longer lives, the lives that they want to live, doing the things they want to do, that sort of thing.
Josh Hoe
And are there mental health implications and mental health care implications too?
Leslie Soble
Absolutely. The way that our bodies interact with different nutrients, certain nutritional deficiencies can actually cause mental health problems, both on an individual level – things like depression, anxiety, things that are really within one’s individual self – and also interpersonal issues. So there have been studies that have actually been done in correctional facilities that showed that when nutritional deficiencies were resolved, the levels of aggressive behavior or violent behavior actually dropped significantly. And so one would think, therefore, that by resolving those deficiencies, [they] would be able to spend less, not only on medical care, but also on mental health care for folks who are struggling with things like depression, or things like aggressive and violent behavior, that can also then be expensive for facilities to deal with when there are more incidences.
Josh Hoe
There’s also kind of an interesting subplot of this . . . that most violence in prison happens around debt – at least in my experience – and a lot of debt is related to food, which starts in hunger. So there’s a lot of different parts of the causes of violence in prison that are probably related in some way to food.
Mika Weinstein
Josh can I just say [something] about that? I think that’s such an important point. And something that I want to take a moment to emphasize is that when we talk to folks in corrections, their number one thing is always safety and security, right? And food is so clearly to us a safety and security issue. You know, 94% of the people who we surveyed said they couldn’t get enough food to feel full, and over 70% said that they had to do things that were against policy or rules to get access to more food. So exactly what you said; we can see how violence and conflict is created out of a circumstance of deprivation, but it’s related to food.
Josh Hoe
There were so many times where you’d see people who were sneaking stuff back to the unit from working in the kitchen, it would almost always have something to do with they were selling it at an exorbitant rate. And so you get these cycles of people trying to get more food. It’s just a vicious circle, literally, and very troubling.
One of the things we keep returning to obviously is massively more deaths in prison because of COVID. Massively more risk of catching COVID in prison. How have things changed in terms of food since the onset of COVID in our prisons? I can’t imagine it’s for the good.
Leslie Soble
No, it’s definitely not for the good. I think the really bad food in prisons has gotten even worse during COVID. So in some states, mealtimes have been reduced to twice a day. In other states, people are only getting cold, bagged meals, like sandwiches and chips for all of their meals, rather than hot meals. You know, we’ve heard from people that at the very beginning of COVID, people who were showing signs and symptoms of having COVID, were being told to still report to work in the chow hall or in the kitchen, so that those people were then potentially exposing everyone else to COVID. And at the same time, once things got really bad, facilities went into lockdown, which meant that everyone was just locked in their cells all the time. And so people don’t have the social aspect of food or eating food around other people, and are now contained in their cells, eating these cold, bagged meals all the time. So quality has really plummeted.
Josh Hoe
When I was incarcerated – this is one of my big frustrations, I’ve talked about this for a number of years – we had a horticulture program, but any vegetables grown had to be donated to local food banks. Couldn’t prisons be developing self-sustaining programs for delivering healthy foods at a low cost to themselves?
Leslie Soble
So I think on the one hand, some of those gardening programs are really great. And they are opportunities for people to learn skills, and to have access to fresh produce. And on the other hand, like you said, there are a number of those programs that don’t actually allow the people who are working in those gardens to eat the food. So having a garden program doesn’t necessarily mean that the food in the facility is going to improve. That being said, yeah, there are great benefits to having an on-site garden and getting fresh fruits and vegetables directly into the facility kitchen. And also, there’s the issue, as Mika was talking about before, with having people who are incarcerated work the land for little or no wages at all. So it’s really a balance, trying to find what would be both fair in terms of providing compensation for people who are in those programs, and at the same time, making sure that the gardens are productive enough to contribute to the meals of the facility, while making sure that the policy states that the food from those gardens goes directly into the facility kitchen.
Josh Hoe
I think you mentioned that something like this is happening at Mountain View Correctional in Charleston, Maine? Is that right? Or something close to this?
Leslie Soble
Yeah. Mountain View has a very large garden. They grow all kinds of vegetables, they have kale, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, all sorts of beautiful gardens. And the food from those gardens goes directly into the facility kitchen during the growing season. And they also have an apple orchard that they rent from a nearby landowner. And the apple orchard has, I think – Mika, what is it, 17 or 18 different heirloom varieties? And so the folks who are learning how to tend the orchard are gaining really important skills to be able to work in the industry once they’re released. The food service manager at Mountain View is very dedicated. His name is Mark McBrien and he’s an organic farmer himself. And he talks about how he believes food can be medicine, or it can be poison. And he’s very dedicated to getting those fresh fruits and vegetables directly in the facility kitchen.
Joshua Hoe
So on the other end of things, I think you mentioned several times earlier, and also in the report, about people reporting on food that’s labeled “not fit for human consumption”. Is this a typical problem? Do you hear it a lot? And what does it actually mean?
Mika Weinstein
We heard anecdotes about this from across the country. I don’t think it’s isolated incidents. It also may not necessarily be the norm that if you walked into any random prison, that that’s what you would see, but we’ve heard it enough times from enough people that there’s clearly a problem with this happening. In terms of what that means, there are a few examples that have come through in lawsuits. There was a lawsuit in Oregon, for example, where I think it was fish bait that was being served to people who are incarcerated there. So it was not meant for human consumption in the sense that it was meant for fishing. We’ve also seen lawsuits that involved cattle feed. And we’ve gotten this question a number of times: How is it that this is legal? How does this happen? We agree, right? It seems unbelievable that this is a thing that could happen. But the truth of the matter is that in the few lawsuits that have been brought to bear trying to challenge the quality of food in prison as cruel and unusual punishment, the courts have very rarely sided with the folks who are trying to challenge the system. And so there isn’t a legal precedent that I’m aware of that says that this practice is not okay.
Josh Hoe
Now, one thing I’ve learned over years of doing this work is that it’s almost impossible to prove a cruel and unusual – an Eighth Amendment case. So if people know they can get away with something, then they’re going to try to get away with whatever they can get away with, unfortunately.
Another side of this whole food thing is the food that is not provided by the institution, in a sense, but is purchased. Your report also talks about items produced for commissary lists. And for anyone who doesn’t know, people in prison can buy items from pre-prepared lists every week or every couple of weeks. Did you all find that the food on these lists – and I think I know the answer to this question – was particularly healthy either?
Leslie Soble
So if your answer is that you think the food was not particularly healthy, then yes, you’re correct.
Josh Hoe
That was definitely the answer.
Leslie Soble
Most of what is on the list is a lot of snack food, like chips and cookies and honey buns, soda. We also heard ramen noodles.
Josh Hoe
Ramen noodles are pretty much the king of incarcerated cooking, basically.
Leslie Soble
So no, it’s not really a healthy alternative. And the few times that there were healthier items, like there might occasionally be nuts, or dried fruit, those things tend to be really expensive. And we learned from a lot of the formerly incarcerated people that we spoke to that most people can’t necessarily afford those.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, oddly enough, some of the only positive memories I have of prison are communal cooking around that stuff. People become experts in taking things that really should not go together and making really delicious food out of what should be really terrible. Did you have anything more that you learned from this second element of food in prisons and jails?
Leslie Soble
So I think you’re absolutely right. People are very resilient and creative. And when given a lack of lemons, they will still figure out how to make lemonade. I think that people are really inclined to look for ways to connect through food, to express identity through food, to feel a sense of comfort through food. And people will fight against the dehumanization and depersonalization in prison through food. And so absolutely, there are a lot of people who spoke with us about how their most positive memories around food while incarcerated were what they made from the commissary, especially with friends; if someone made a surprise birthday cake out of commissary cookies and put in pudding stolen from the kitchen . . . and at the same time, that doesn’t mean that those foods are actually contributing to long-term wellness.
Josh Hoe
Another element of this whole thing is cleanliness around the kitchen and the kitchen facilities. What did you learn about prison kitchen facilities and food handling expectations?
Mika Weinstein
Sure. What we found is that the processes for sanitation and safety inspections vary state to state. There are no federal guidelines, expectations or oversight processes. There are some states where they partner with the Department of Health, for example, who has inspectors come in. Most commonly, we found that it is the state agency who inspects their own facilities; it would be the food administrator at the state level, who would have staff that would inspect the kitchens at the facilities under their jurisdiction. But from the folks who have experienced incarceration, what we heard again, many times, was that the kitchen staff – I mean, the facility as a whole, always knew when the inspection was going to occur. And people who maybe wouldn’t have otherwise gone to meals that day would show up on the day that they knew the inspector was going to be there because they knew that there would be better portions and better quality food, right. And absent those inspections, we heard – I can’t even count the number of stories that related to issues with sanitation and safety – whether it be mold, vermin, or other foreign objects in the food . . . [it’s] just horrifying when you think about these being the only meals that you have access to.
Josh Hoe
And I would imagine that if I were trying to buy cheap food, one of the things I might do is try to get really cheap prices on stuff that’s past its expiration date. I imagine most stores are willing to sell that at a much cheaper rate. Is it true or widespread that departments of corrections either buy and serve food that’s past its expiration dates purposely, or just keep food for such a long time that it gets past its expiration dates? Is that a common problem?
Leslie Soble
We definitely heard from people that they noticed food that’s past its expiration date in the kitchen. And I remember one correctional officer telling us that she would often have guys come up to her and say: Look at this meat; the expiration date is two years past. So it is something that happens. Again, I don’t think it happens in every facility. But it was certainly common enough that multiple people spoke about this with us. It’s not anything that correctional agency leaders have talked about. So I think this is one of those things that it’s hard to get more information about exactly how common it is.
Josh Hoe
What about people who have food allergies or diabetes or need a special diet? What did you find out about that?
Mika Weinstein
There are formal processes through which folks can request special diets. The number and type of special diets vary state to state; they’re commonly special diets that are focused on health reasons, like you said, maybe someone has an allergy or has diabetes. And then there are other special diets that are specific to someone’s religious observance. And, again, this process is not uniform. But we heard many stories from folks who have been incarcerated, that it can be a lot of bureaucratic red tape to try to get access to these diets. There was someone who we talked to who was allergic to beans, and the process he had to go through, I think, was multiple tests to actually show that he was allergic to beans. And throughout that time, he still had to eat the mainline fare. And when he finally got a replacement approved, it was pasta instead of another protein. That’s just one example; we feature others in the report. But while these special diets do exist, it’s not always an easy process to get access to the food that people need.
Josh Hoe
And what about the use of food as a disciplinary measure? I certainly remember when I was incarcerated, whenever anyone was sent to solitary, they would get what was called “loaf”, which is kind of some bizarre compression of food from what everyone else would get. What did you learn about food as a disciplinary measure?
Leslie Soble
So interestingly, one of the things that most correctional leaders would tell us is that they don’t use food as a disciplinary measure. Food should never be used as a disciplinary measure. And at the same time, we heard so many stories from people who, like you, also received the loaf or nutraloaf – there are a number of names for it – while they were in solitary confinement.
Josh Hoe
And let me tell you, it’s as special as it sounds.
Leslie Soble
And we’ve heard so many stories from people about other ways that food would be used as punishment as well, from something as simple as you know, the officer saw you trading a food item in the chow hall. So now you both have to throw away your trays; or an officer might smash your commissary stash for some random reason.
Josh Hoe
Oh, yeah, that that definitely happens.
Leslie Soble
And there are stories of things like – I think it was in an Alabama prison – where the warden said that people whose hairstyles weren’t in compliance with the codes were not going to get their meals, or were going to be fed disciplinary meals. So there are definitely ways in which food is used as a disciplinary measure, as a punishment, even when officials say that it’s not.
Josh Hoe
And then we also have the design element of eating, that generally when people eat together, it’s social space. You know, it can be something that is a way to share significant experience with each other, food is a social experience I think, for most of us outside. Are there problems with the design of chow halls?
Leslie Soble
Yes. And I think for a number of reasons. You brought up the social aspect of it, and that’s definitely a big one. We had people telling us that it’s really stressful in the chow hall because it’s so loud and crowded and you don’t necessarily get to choose who you’re sitting with. So the person sitting next to you could be your enemy. You know, that social aspect of it can be taken away. And at the same time, there’s also the literal physical environment of the chow hall. So, as humans, we respond to different physical cues, our physical environment really matters. Things like light and sound and smell can cue physiological and psychological responses inside our bodies. And those can be either positive or negative. And if you think about it, if you’re at home, and you’re trying to have a romantic dinner with your partner, maybe you dim the lights, you put on some music, you cook something that smells good . . . so we’re aware of this way of using these cues, even if we’re not actually thinking about it. But in a prison chow hall there’s fluorescent lighting, there often aren’t windows in the chow hall, it’s very loud, it’s all concrete, there are metal bolted-down chairs, tables with stools, rather than tables and chairs. You know, people wait in line, and they wait in line, and then they finally go up to a window where the food might be handed out just by a pair of hands through a slot. It’s very dehumanizing. It’s very stressful. You’ve got people shouting, or you might have corrections officers yelling at you to hurry up. And so all of this put together can cause disruption in the body; it can actually make people experience a fight or flight response, which can then make people put them in a mindset where they might misinterpret social cues as hostility, which again, makes the environment less safe for everyone involved. So yeah, the light and the sound, all of these things impact the ways that our body absorbs and digests food, alongside the social aspect. And there’s the expectation that when we eat food, it’s a social experience. It’s something that we share with other people.
Josh Hoe
You know, one of the things people always bring up is private prisons. And I always say that private prisons affect about 8% of incarcerated people. But prison privatization affects 100% of people incarcerated. Michigan’s experience with food privatization was so bad that even the correctional officers joined the fight that ultimately ended the practice here. What did you all learn about food privatization?
Mika Weinstein
There are a number of states, even if they don’t operate fully private prisons, they’ve privatized elements of incarceration. And one of those is food service. So we did hear from someone who had worked in corrections that one of the benefits of privatized food service is that the contract requires more monitoring than maybe you would see in just a normal state-operated system. And so from that perspective, you might get better compliance. What we heard generally, though, across the board, was that privatized food did tend to be worse; there’s no incentive for, I mean, there’s little incentive for anyone who’s working in correctional food service, to make sure that the folks who are incarcerated there actually enjoy the food, right? It’s not a customer service relationship.
Josh Hoe
I laugh to stop from crying.
Mika Weinstein
But when the food is privatized, it’s even a further degree removed, where they’re being paid per meal, regardless of whether people show up, whether people eat the food or like the food, there’s really no incentive for them to cook meals that people are going to enjoy eating. And again, because they’re a corporation, their concern is the bottom line, they’re going to cut corners, where they can, and that leads to an overall degradation in the quality of food, which is what we heard for the most part from folks who have experienced privatized food service.
Josh Hoe
So this brings us to – I was going to ask a large number of questions about this, but I think it’d be better just to ask a two-part question. Maybe both of you could take a stab at it. What should we be doing differently? And how do we get to where we’re doing something different? Because as you mentioned before, it’s nearly impossible to win an Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment case. And there’s not a lot of incentive for departments of corrections to change if they’re not going to be forced to change. So what should we do and how do we get to where we’re doing something different?
Leslie Soble
That’s an excellent question.
Josh Hoe
I don’t know if you actually have an answer.
Leslie Soble
So in terms of what we should be doing differently, I think the first thing is we need to re-examine the standards of what is accepted in terms of prison food. We have this sense of, oh, prison food is bad, and that’s okay; it’s supposed to be bad. And we need to stop thinking like that and shift the narrative that people who are incarcerated only deserve bad food. And actually think about ways that people should be eating that promote health and well-being, and really try to work towards that.
What would that look like? We would have food that’s actually food – a good place to start, right? Fresh fruits and vegetables, high-quality protein, food that people would want to eat on the outside, food that tastes good and smells good. And also be able to use food as a way of trying to help people heal. So giving people an opportunity to have meals with their families on visitation days, or if kids are coming to visit their parents in prison, how about some sort of cooking class that they can take together? There are so many ways that I think food could be used to help strengthen relationships, and to put people into a better mindset. And we’re just not taking advantage of those opportunities right now. And there’s certainly plenty more I could say, but Mika, I’ll hand it over to you to give this one a go.
Mika Weinstein
I would echo what Leslie said, and a few other things come to mind for me. There are changes that can be made on many different levels, right, there are things that an individual facility food service manager can do, that are currently within their power to change the quality of the food that they’re serving. There is policy that we can advocate to change so that, like Leslie said, the standards and guidelines are different. There’s also, I think, a really important piece of the puzzle, which is that we incarcerate too many people. And that’s not something that leaders of departments of correction have control over; they don’t get to decide how many people are convicted and sent to them. So not everything is under their control. But as a society, we’ve adhered to this very tough on crime narrative, and sent people to prison, but we aren’t willing to foot the bill to actually provide basic human rights and a decent standard of living for people who are incarcerated. My opinion, obviously, is that rather than funding departments of correction to a greater extent, that we drastically reduce the number of people who are incarcerated. If we cut the prison population in half, it would be a lot easier to afford better quality food for the folks who were there, right. And that’s something that there’s not one specific action necessarily that I can say that everyone should take, but as a society try to move in a direction where we’re actually shrinking the size of our prison systems and the number of people who are under correctional control.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I think both of you would have to admit – to some extent, Leslie’s answer encompassed this – is that a lot of this is a political question. And we’ve been facing five decades of what I would call Willie Horton politics. Do you have any ideas for how we can move the politics of this – which is really where this has to happen? If it’s, you know, causing more decarceration? You know, hence the name of the podcast, or just ensuring that people get better food? Do you have any thoughts on creating the political will to make these changes?
Mika Weinstein
I think that’s part of the purpose of our report. Everyone understands food, even if they don’t have the language for it. Leslie talked about this; we use food to communicate values and relationships. And one of our hopes in releasing this report was that by giving people a window into how terrible the experience of eating in prison is, [the report] will help generate some understanding and compassion for the fact that people who are incarcerated are people, you can put yourself in their shoes – if you can imagine not having control over what you eat every day. I mean, that sounds like a nightmare, frankly, to me, let alone all the other horrors of incarceration. And so anything that we can do to uplift the voices of folks who have been incarcerated to tear down the walls, the black boxes you mentioned earlier, to expose people to the conditions of incarceration, I think is helpful in the process of humanizing those folks and hopefully, pushing the kind of overall narrative towards: is this really what we want to be spending our communal resources on?
Josh Hoe
Leslie, did you have any thoughts?
Leslie Soble
I agree with everything Mika said. And to piggyback on that, I think we also need to work on raising awareness of the depth of the impact of food. I think like Mika said, we’re all very aware of food on this visceral level; we all have feelings about it. And we all have food experiences, whether you’re a food-obsessed person like the three of us are or not. Food really resonates with a lot of people and tells you a lot about someone, the way that they eat. But some of the deeper impacts, looking at the relationship between food and trauma, or the relationship between nutrition and substance use, or about the physical eating environment and health, all of these things have really deep, profound impacts that I don’t think most people are aware of.
Josh Hoe
This year I’m asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others. Do you have any favorites?
Mika Weinstein
Yeah, I’ll give a shout out to a book called Through the W.I.R.E., written by Lashonia Thompson-El, who’s a friend of mine. It’s a memoir of her experience growing up in DC, in a really violent circumstance, and then she ended up being incarcerated for I think, 19 years. And she is now the Co-director of the Cure the Violence program that’s run through the Office of the Attorney General in DC. That’s a violence interruption program that is focused on de-escalation and preventing conflicts before they turn into violence. She’s amazing, and her memoir and story are amazing. And I yeah, I’d love for more people to read about it.
Josh Hoe
Leslie?
Leslie Soble
I will recommend What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System, by Vivian Nixon and Daryl V. Atkinson. That book I think holds a special meaning for those of us working at Impact Justice, because our wonderful colleague, Terah Lawyer, has a chapter in there. And she’s the leader of the Homecoming Project at Impact Justice, which is a program that provides housing, shared housing spaces in people’s homes. It’s kind of like an Airbnb-style situation for returning citizens.
Josh Hoe
If people are looking for your report, where can they find it?
Mika Weinstein
They can find it on our website, which is impact ustice.org. It’s right on the homepage right now. Or you can google Eating Behind Bars, and I’m sure it will pop up.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question: What did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not?
Mika Weinstein
I think you asked great questions, Josh, we got to cover a lot of material. Of course, in our 130- page report, there’s a lot of detail that we didn’t get to talk about. And so I would encourage folks to go find the report and read it or read sections of it. And I would just like to end, personally, on the thought that this is a problem we can do something about. There are so many issues in our society that feel intractable, complicated, like we don’t know how to solve it. But people have been working on improving food in K-12 schools; they’ve put a lot of resources and time and effort into doing that. And there are models in other countries we can look at; we know that it is possible to change the quality and quantity of food in prison to a place that’s acceptable. And to me that feels like something that we can do.
Josh Hoe
Anything to add, Leslie?
Leslie Soble
I would just add that this is an issue that again, touches so many people, and really touches so many different movements for justice. It’s an issue of conditions in justice work. It’s a food justice issue. It’s a racial justice issue. It’s a labor rights issue. It’s an environmental sustainability issue. No matter what you’re working on right now, please try and consider how the issue of food in prison fits into your work, and fits onto your agenda for change because it really touches so many people.
Josh Hoe
This was a really enjoyable conversation and I learned a lot. Thanks so much for doing this; I really appreciate the time.
Josh Hoe
And now my take.
In many ways, my effective activism started with an organized Twitter protest against Federal Correctional Officers complaining in the press about holiday meals for incarcerated people. One of the very first episodes of this podcast nearly four years ago was discussing problems with prison food. And yet, here we are, still discussing the same problem.
A large percentage of violence in prison revolves around food. Food is the primary currency in prison and debt is often paid off in food items. People without funds in their store accounts also covet and extort people who do have funds in their store accounts. At least some of this violence is attributable directly to the fact that prison food is god-awful terrible. It’s not filling, it’s not nutritious, and usually is beyond disgusting to taste and eat. As a result, too often competition over the more filling, more costly, and equally unhealthy food for purchase from the store list often becomes physical, and sometimes even deadly.
In addition, one of the largest costs in prison budgets is health care. Prisons may not have to provide great health care, but they do have to provide health care, and poor nutrition leads to bad health and worse health outcomes, which is one of the largest drivers of prison costs. All of this happens even though food is one of the smallest, and not one of the largest budgetary costs. And the means exist in almost every prison to grow fruits and vegetables through prison horticulture programs.
As Bruce Western mentioned during last week’s podcast, so many of the problems in our prisons start with the societal dehumanization of people in prison by people outside of prisons. Way too often people outside of prison refuse to consider people in prison as human beings. We have to start valuing people who happen to be in prison as human beings if we want any of this to change. Maybe – I’m just suggesting, just throwing this out there – we could start by ensuring that incarcerated people get healthy, nutritious and filling food to eat.
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