I’ve written in the past about an awful experience I had in prison a decade ago while serving 23 months in prison after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. I was doing my time at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a low-security prison in the Appalachian Mountains. One of the very first things I found, on my very first day, was that the food was bad. Very bad.
I arrived in prison on a Thursday. The next day, Friday, was “fish day.” A fellow prisoner warned me to skip the fish. “We call it sewer trout,” he said. “you don’t want to put that in your body.” Sure enough, when I got in line in the cafeteria, I saw boxes stacked behind the servers. Every box was very clearly marked, “Alaskan Cod. Product of China. Not for human consumption. FEED USE ONLY.” That’s what the servers were slopping onto our trays.
Things only got worse from there. I won’t go into detail about the rat that drowned in the Kool-Aid dispenser. I suppose things like that will happen from time to time. But one incident still makes me angry 10 years later. Every Wednesday evening was “taco night.” This disgusting concoction was ground beef, some sort of “sauce,” and a little onion. It was truly inedible and I threw it away more often than I ate it.
One day, guards posted a memo from the warden in every housing unit saying, “Sorry. Through no mistake of our own, the company that sends us the ground beef for tacos accidentally mismarked a shipment of dog food as ‘ground beef’. That dog food was served to inmates. The Bureau of Prisons will fine the company.”
I later read in Prison Legal News magazine that the company was fined and the BOP kept the money. But the real shame here isn’t even that we ate dog food. The real shame is that we didn’t even realize that it was dog food because the food is so bad every day. I can’t tell you how many expired foods we were served, still in the packaging, and how many years-old frozen bagels, dyed green for some previous St. Patrick’s Day, we were served every Sunday for a year.
Hellbound and Down 