Pennsylvania prisons – inedible food

During a recent video visit with a person incarcerated at SCI Pine Grove in Pennsylvania, I was told they had been cautioned not to eat the country-fried steak being served, because “it came in moldy.” The food comes in all the time in boxes marked “Not For Human Consumption” and then is hastily transferred to unmarked storage bags. In addition to the cautionary label, an incarceree at SCI Camp Hill also reported that meat served is often moldy, as reported by an incarceree at SCI Camp Hill.

Moldy meat reported by someone incarcerated at SCI Camp Hill.

Sauces are often used to camouflage the mold. At SCI Pine Hill, one person has a prison job as a kitchen worker, letting them regularly “liberate” fresh fruit and vegetables and consume them. But what about all those who cannot obtain fresh fruit or vegetables?

Throughout the years, the quality of food put out in prisons to incarcerees has long been a point of angry discourse between families, elected officials and prison management. These complaints have not only been about the food itself but the portions and the way it is “served.”

There have been numerous complaints and demands that this situation be rectified, only to have restrictions grow tighter and tighter. Nearly every service in prisons is privatized, and food is no exception. Aramark, a multibillion dollar Fortune 500 global corporation, holds the bid to supply Pennsylvania prisons with food. Their bid came in at a figure of $1.02 per individual meal.

In decades past, loved ones and families could send or bring food into those in captivity. George Jackson’s letters home often asked his mother to send sausages or other foodstuff!

Not too long ago there was a working vegetable garden at Pennsylvania’s SCI Muncy, which provided the women incarcerated there with fresh produce in their meals. Families were once permitted to bring in food for visits where they all could gather with their loved ones and share a meal.

But that is now gone.

A quick perusal of prison menus, standardized at all institutions throughout Pennsylvania, lists mainly pasta, soy meat and sauces — used to cover-up questionable items.

Pennsylvania political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, incarcerated in SCI Mahanoy, underwent double heart bypass surgery in 2021, and his doctor prescribed a heart-healthy diet. To this day, all he is provided with are high-sugar, high-salt, high-carb, highly processed foods.

When questioned about another issue pertaining to the health and well-being of prisoners, an official for the PA Department of Prisons responded with an answer that went like this: “We are not going to change; it’s only our job to provide basics, nothing further than that.”

Change has to come from the activists, the people united!