At best you get “mystery meat”. Or “sour-smelling heaps” of macaroni. In the worst cases, it’s undercooked chicken, spoiled milk and maggot-infested produce.
In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold.
The book by Leslie Soble, a Washington DC-based ethnographer and folklorist, describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people; she co-wrote Eating Behind Bars with Impact Justice colleagues, Alex Busansky and Aishatu R Yusuf.
The book lays out the “gastronomic cruelty” and “culinary malpractice” inside prisons, where residents “subsist – barely – on carb-heavy, ultraprocessed foods”. Portions are “just enough to keep you alive”. The book is based on surveys of hundreds of formerly incarcerated people and their families, in-depth interviews, in-prison focus groups and testimony from officials and activists.
Some may see this as a niche issue or a case of liberals wanting to provide incarcerated people with gourmet meals. But the prison food crisis, Soble argues, has significant widespread implications. It’s a public health crisis, with estimates suggesting each year behind bars reduces life expectancy by two years. It’s a labor rights issue, as incarcerated people earn pennies per hour running the kitchens, barely enough to buy canteen snacks to supplement their meager diets. And there are environmental ramifications: US correctional facilities create an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually as residents reject unpalatable offerings.
The Guardian spoke to Soble about her findings – and the solutions her group and others are pursuing to transform food systems behind bars.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What drew you to documenting the realities of food behind bars?
I’m an ethnographer and folklorist, which means studying the simple, everyday pieces of our life and finding the bigger meaning. I grew up in a very food-centric home. Food has always fascinated me. In 2018, I saw a job posting for a criminal justice reform non-profit looking for someone to study food in prison. I had never stopped to think deeply about what it means to eat while incarcerated and have all these restrictions around the ways you interact with food. The posting called for someone to look at nutrition in prison, what’s on the tray, how that impacts people’s health. I was interested in how food impacts mental, emotional and behavioral health, our identity, the interactions with people around us. I really wanted to examine this question of, what is the message we’re sending to and about incarcerated people through the food being served?
Can you paint a picture of the average prison meals in the US?
A typical prison diet is very high in ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and salt, and very low in fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein, whole grains. These meals are designed to keep people alive, not to nourish them. They don’t smell, taste or look good. There are lots of hotdogs, baloney sandwiches, soggy pasta with a mysterious sauce, something that might be called “salad”, but it’s really just a handful of wilted iceberg lettuce. We hear about cake that’s meant to be dessert, but is really designed to increase calories. There are fortified beverages that come in a powder like Kool-Aid. It’s supposed to provide critical nutrients, but many told us they don’t drink it, because the taste is chemical and they don’t know what’s in it. I’ve heard of people finding a rat tail, roaches or metal in their food, or getting curdled milk with chunks.
What did you learn about the ways food can be used as a form of punishment?
When a judge sentences someone to five years, they don’t say you’re also sentenced to lifelong diabetes and high blood pressure. People enter prison in one state of health and come out with exacerbated or new health conditions. That’s an additional punishment. We’ve also heard about strict chow hall rules. If someone wants to share food or exchange items with someone, a guard might take away their trays, throw them out and write them up. People are sent to solitary confinement if they take a piece of fruit or bread back to their living quarters, and it’s treated as contraband.
What is the emotional toll of being served these meals?
I often ask correctional leaders to close their eyes and think about food in their own lives – how you feel when you have a delicious, home-cooked meal, sitting with loved ones and there’s a sense of ease. Now think about how you feel eating from a fast-food place rushed in your car, or at table fighting with someone and it’s super tense, or you have food that tastes bad. You feel different emotional states in those settings. That human relationship to food doesn’t change behind bars. Being served something you know is harmful to your health can eat away at you.
How do people cope?
Human beings are so creative and resilient, especially when it comes to food. Some folks who were incarcerated will tell you some of their better memories from prison are actually around food – the times they made something communally, using stuff they’ve stolen from the kitchen or garden or bought from the commissary, times they’ve cobbled together things like birthday cakes, or managed to get soup for someone who is sick, or a celebration meal for a holiday. Something that reminds them of life outside prison.
Your book says that many incarcerated people have jobs where they make mere pennies producing food they can’t even consume. How does this work?
In a number of corrections departments across the country, there are agricultural programs [using the labor of incarcerated people] that produce enormous quantities of food – fresh vegetables, dairy products, meat. That food in many cases isn’t going on their trays. It’s sold off at profit to the state. So many people have to spend hours working these jobs in plantation-like settings, whether the jobs are voluntary or mandatory. Some are actually on the grounds of former plantations. In the south, it can be really hot and humid. They don’t necessarily have access to water or sunscreen. They’re growing healthy, fresh food that could nourish them, but they could be sent to solitary for just grabbing a handful of tomatoes. Then there are people working inside kitchens, sometimes in dangerous conditions, getting up at 2am to prepare breakfast, using dangerous chemicals, they might not have protective gear, or the equipment isn’t functioning properly. Some might not be paid at all.
Activists are pushing reforms across the country. What are common threads you see in impactful organizing?
The work is most successful when it’s driven by people who have been or are incarcerated or have loved ones in prison. Return Strong, a Nevada group [formed by incarcerated people’s families], is one of the most successful, and that’s partly because they have this ability to be relentless, to not stop demanding accountability, to never shut up. They demand everyone see how important this is. A willingness to try out different messaging is also important. A lot of successful groups talk in financial terms – “return on investment”. If you give people better food, healthcare and security costs go down, and it sets people up for a more successful re-entry.
Where do you see promise in changing these systems?
Impact Justice works with the University of California and the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR) on a Harvest of the Month program. We bring local food from small, sustainable farmers – asparagus, avocados, persimmons, kiwis, strawberries, mandarin oranges – on to CDCR trays. One food service manager in a central California prison told us: “I’ve been working here 27 years and I’ve never seen a lemon inside this facility.” He made lemon chicken, and there were additional lemons people could take. Some squeezed it into soup to make it kind of like pho. Others put it on hot Cheetos, like a street snack. One person dried the peel and cut it into strips, flavoring his water for weeks. It’s so simple. Why would we prevent people from having lemons? That doesn’t make the world safer. When we said we would be bringing strawberries, a man started crying because he hadn’t seen a strawberry in 17 years.
You talk in the book about Iceland, Norway and other countries doing a better job. What are some obstacles to adopting similar reforms here?
One barrier is we simply lock up too many people in this country. We’ve got roughly 2 million people locked up at any given time, and that number is growing again. We also have very lengthy sentences. If you look at countries that do prison food more humanely, they don’t lock up huge portions of their population, and don’t lock them up for decades, giving them more resources to feed people better. Another barrier is our attitude toward food. We’re still very caught up in a standard American diet, which is not particularly healthy. This over-incarceration and under-promotion of nourishing food are a perfect storm. People often ask is the biggest barrier cost or policy? And I say cost and policy are both rooted in people’s attitudes toward people who are incarcerated. If we started from a place of saying they are community members, they’re parents, friends, siblings and neighbors who deserve care, then policy and funding would look different.
