Chris Hedges: Food Behind Bars Isn’t Fit for Your Dog

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Food Behind Bars Isn’t Fit for Your Dog

Posted on Dec 22, 2013
By Chris Hedges


Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. It is one more sign that the business of locking up poor people in corporate America is booming.

Aramark, whose website says it provides 1 million meals a day to prisoners, does what corporations are doing throughout the society: It lavishes campaign donations on pliable politicians, who in turn hand out state and federal contracts to political contributors, as well as write laws and regulations to benefit their corporate sponsors at the expense of the poor. Aramark fires unionized workers inside prisons and jails and replaces them with underpaid, nonunionized employees. And it makes sure the food is low enough in both quality and portion to produce huge profits.

Aramark, often contracted to provide food to prisoners at about a dollar a meal, is one of numerous corporations, from phone companies to construction firms, that have found our grotesque system of mass incarceration to be very profitable. The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers. More than 2.2 million men and women are in prisons and jails in the U.S.

Crystal Jordan, who has spent 23 years as a corrections officer in New Jersey and who works at the Burlington County Jail, and another corrections officer at the jail, who did not want to be named, told me that the food doled out to prisoners by Aramark is not only substandard but often spoiled. For nearly a decade Jordan has filed complaints about the conditions in the jail, including persistent mold on walls and elsewhere, with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state and county officials. The results of her complaints have been negligible. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/food_behind_bars_isnt_fit_for_your_dog_20131222

[spanone]

1. how many people are sitting in jails due to privatization? 1 is too many.

[Jerry442]

5. There was a judge who was actually getting paid under the table...

...to sentence kids to time in a local private facility. Sorry, I don't recall the particulars of the case. Maybe someone here does.

It amazes me that people have a hard time understanding that massive incentives for perverse behavior lead to perverse behavior.

[Ednahilda]

9. "Kids for Cash" happened in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is in northeast PA.

Wilkes-Barre is the big city in Luzerne Co.

The two judges involved are serving prison sentences and the charges against the kids have been dropped. Here's the Wikipedia explanation of the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

[Jerry442]

10. TY :) nt

[niyad]

16. PA family court judge, if i recall, who just happened to be a shareholder in that facility.

further info:



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Undue Process
‘Kids for Cash’ and ‘The Injustice System’
By ABBE SMITH

THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM


Two recent books put a damper on the celebration, revealing just how random and impoverished justice can be, and how flimsy the right to counsel. In “Kids for Cash,” the investigative reporter William Ecenbarger tells the story behind a corruption scandal so brazen and cruel it defies imagination. Between 2003 and 2008, two Pennsylvania judges accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from a private juvenile detention facility in exchange for sending children — girls and boys, some as young as 11 — to jail.

It is a harrowing tale, lucidly told by a journalist with a good eye for detail. The children’s stories continue to unsettle long after the book ends: the 13-year-old incarcerated forthrowing a piece of steak at his mother’s boyfriend; the 15-year-old for throwing a sandal at her mother; the 11-year-old for calling the police after his mother locked him out of the house; the 14-year-old for writing a satirical Myspace profile. Another 14-year-old, an A student, was sentenced for writing “Vote for Michael Jackson” on a few stop signs; she had a seizure while in detention, banging her head so hard she cracked her dental braces.

Mark Ciavarella is the judge who sent away all those children — and several thousand others — in cahoots with Judge Michael Conahan. Ecenbarger calls what took place “a routine and systematic form of child abuse.” After the briefest of hearings — the average length was four minutes — kids were dispatched to detention centers in which the judges had a financial interest. If parents were unable to pay the costs of detention, their children were sometimes held longer. One teenager’s Social Security survivor’s check, from his father’s death, was garnished to pay the costs.

What happened in Luzerne County, formerly known for coal and now for organized crime and public corruption (in certain districts, teachers have to pay for teaching jobs), was not a case of rogue judges acting alone. In a “festival of injustice,” prosecutors, public defenders, teachers and court employees saw it all and did nothing. At Ciavarella’s direction, juvenile probation officers talked kids out of exercising their right to counsel.

. . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/books/review/kids-for-cash-and-the-injustice-system.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[zonkers]

13. Ha! This is no shocker. Prison is an overpriced hotel you cannot leave and commissary

is the hotel gift shop --- you (or your family) over pay for everything -- from shitty razors to third world crackers to sugared up drinks. And if you can't pay, it is even worse. And this does not just go for hardcore prison per se,.this goes for people who are in jail, pre-trial.

[randome]

2. The food Aramark provides to corporate cafeterias is substandard, too.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]There is nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it.
Nothing.[/center][/font][hr]

[Aerows]

12. I guess that excuses it

You eat the same food as a prisoner, since you are forced to eat at the cafeteria. And pay for it.

I don't know who is more wrong here, Aramark, or the people that actually pay for substandard food.

[randome]

18. Doesn't excuse it at all, I just think Aramark is bottom-of-the-barrel all around.

And I never eat cafeteria food. I value my health.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[Aerows]

25. I think just about

everyone saw what you tried to do there. Unsuccessful.

[niyad]

19. the people in corporate have a number of options available to them.

[sabrina 1]

20. Good then that settles it. End these contracts and return our judicial system to the government.

At least the Corporatists only have occasional meals in the cafeterias. People in jail, most of whom don't belong there and wouldn't be there if they were wealthy, cannot escape that poison.

[randome]

24. I know. Rehabilitation isn't helped by 'punishment' food. The world isn't Sheriff Arpaio's fiefdom.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[xchrom]

3. du rec.

[LeftyMom]

4. Many years ago my dad ran prison kitchens for a living.

The food was good. It was usually baked chicken with some spices, mixed veg and some rice or a potato, nothing fancy. The guards and other staff ate the same food, and it was literally good enough for the supervising cook to feed his kids (we sat in his office for the day a few times because our sitter flaked out on a day when school was not in session.) Part of his job was teaching inmates how to work in a commercial kitchen, and he took that responsibility seriously.

That wasn't a contract kitchen though, he was employed by the state and made a good living. Still, if the focus of your system is to return functioning, healthy people to the real world feeding them a decent meal and teaching some of them a trade are both good investments.

[JEB]

14. All this privatizing that has become so fashionable

has reduced the quality of work and products throughout our government. Private companies care first and foremost about profit. Quick and cheap using any shortcuts possible, that is how contractors make money whether it be prison food or security services or education. Privatization is fracturing the structure and perverting the intent of our great public institutions, public schools, our military, even prisons.

[yardwork]

21. So true.

[mountain grammy]

6. K & R for the disgusting truth...

[ryan_cats]

7. Doesn't good 'ol sheriff Joe Arpaio brag about what he servers to prisoners?

Doesn't good 'ol sheriff Joe Arpaio brag about what he servers to prisoners?
He serves his charges with green balloni, no salt no pepper and last I read, only two meals a day to save money.

[niyad]

17. if i recall, he bragged about the "food" on t-day, something like 47 cents a person.

[sorefeet]

8. I think the estimates

are between 60 and 100,000 prisoners are completely innocent. At 50 grand a pop, do the math. 50% are in for non-violent crimes. They make crimes here that are not crimes in other countries for profits. Our law makers are the real criminals.

[BelgianMadCow]

11. 2,2 million times 40.000 dollar is 88 billion, per year

a neat little turnover there, in the prison industrial complex.

Chris Hedges autorec.

This bit stood out to me:

Aramark has been plagued by scandal across the country, but this does not seem to affect its ability to get new state and county contracts. More than 270 prisoners were sickened in April 2008 at Florida’s Santa Rosa Correctional Institution after eating Aramark chili. Some 50 prisoners at Colorado’s Larimer County Detention Center became ill in February 2008 after eating Aramark chili. Prisoners in Clayton County, Ga., were not served hot food from October 2009 to the following Jan. 22 because the pressure cookers in the jail kitchen were inoperable.

What's the saying, tell me how you treat the poorest & the most unlucky and I will tell you who you are?

[JEB]

15. Nelson Mandela quote,

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

[Kurovski]

22. K&R. (nt)

[politichew]

23. K&R for making prisons more humane. nt

[Diego_Native 2012]

26. The average cost per meal for inmates is in

the $0.30 - $0.50 range. At least in Texas with which I am familiar. The food fed to those men is overcooked, always soft, devoid of texture and flavor and mostly starches. Meat, in Texas prisons, is served once every two weeks. The rest of the time it's the cheapest soy garbage you can imagine.

What is worse? All Texas prisons have an inmate commissary. Inmates who can afford it, eat processed foods to supplement the trash served in the chow halls. A private company, of course, runs the commissaries.