This originally aired on The Final Straw radio show.
I’ve been locked up for twenty three years roughly. I’ve eaten more than 25,000 consecutive meals in state custody, and that means I’ve likely developed an immunity to just about every food-borne pathogen known to humans -bacterial, fungal, viral… you name it. Considering everything my digestive tract has been exposed to, I could probably eat machine parts and lead paint with a side order of radioactive isotopes, and I’d end up pooping out a tiny x-ray machine.
Whenever people write to me, the two most popular topics for inquiry are prison rape and prison food. Free world people seem concerned most about what’s getting shoved into either end of human captives. Let’s talk about the food.
In 23 years, I’ve witnessed the evolution of prison food delivery. With each successive “improvement” the food situation has gotten markedly worse. I can foresee a scenario where, if food service improves much more, all 50,000 of us Ohio captives could die of malnutrition, or food poisoning before the end of the next contract cycle… and thats coming from the guy who could snack on radioactive isotopes. Cesium 137, please mustard, hold the relish.
When I first got locked up, prisoners ran food service. Prisoner clerks even ordered the supplies, kept the accounts and budgets. On the chow line, every item but the main course was self-serve. If you wanted, you could grab a whole loaf of bread and scoop an entire pan of mashed potatoes. The catch, of course, is that whatever you took, you better eat. At the end of the meal, when you tossed your metal fork and spoon into the bucket near the exit, the shakedown guard would watch you dump your tray. Throwing away food would lead to consequences.
From the perspective of the current regime, that system is considered “poor resource management.” Food budgets were higher. Of course they were. But administrators weren’t just buying more mashed potatoes. Prisoners had full stomachs. They were less irritable. The segregation unit was always half empty. The prisons ran themselves and administrators were merely spectators.
Then the system evolved. There was a move to hire in more administrators with a “business”orientation, to streamline costs and centralize or universalize everything, including the statewide menu. All expenditures were scrutinized by these new administrators like Khelleh Konteh, former warden at Toledo, who has a business degree. He did not know rehabilitation from basket weaving, but he could cut the budget on mashed potatoes. All menu items were portioned out by civilians whose job security was dependent upon reducing portions and cutting costs.
Yup, misconduct and disruption increased dramatically and the segregation units were overflowing with prisoners slated for higher security, which is always more expensive per prisoner. What the business wonks didn’t factor in was that their savings in the food budget simply cost them more in other ways. News flash: Hungry, angry, desperate prisoners become less manageable. With the spike in behavioral problems, they built a multi-million dollar supermax where the cost to house each prisoner is considerably higher than any other institution. In one sense, OSP was built out of mashed potatoes. With the court mandated “healthy heart” diet, the state found an excuse to cut portions again; all without making the diet any healthier. I described the toxicity of that diet in my zine, “Not Fit for Human Consumption.”
But the latest evolution was to outsource food to the Aramark Correctional Services Corporation. Philadelphia-based Aramark’s profit motives directly conflict with it’s mission to provide food service. Profit margins for Aramark increase the more they skimp on portions and lower food quality. So, really, Aramark isn’t in the food service business. Aramark is in the profit business. Just like the managers of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, Aramark’s private interests are served by causing malnutrition and starvation of captives. Aramark makes money by producing hungry, angry prisoners and damaging their health… at the taxpayers expense.
On top of it, Aramark has gotton caught in a consistent pattern of corruption and rip-offs, as detailed in an A.P. story by Julia Carr Smyth on 14 June 2013, and again by the Columbus Dispatch’s Randy Ludlow on 19 April 2014- two stories that obviously only skim the surface of a much deeper problem, since we know the mainstream media is to truth what Aramark is to food.
My own documented run-ins with Aramark will soon be posted at Sean Swain.org and on Facebook.
So, don’t be surprised when Ohio outsources the digging of mass graves to a private landscaping firm in order to bury the victim’s of Aramark’s malnutrition scam. Mass graves, the wave of the future.
In the meantime, can you pass those isotopes? I’m starving.
This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from Ohio’s supermax facility.
If you’re listening, you are the resistance.