Prison Food Past and Present

I’ve at all times had an curiosity in meals and cooking and it got here as a specific delight when in my final 5 years of service, I grew to become head of an Investigation and Audit workforce in one among London’s largest prisons. A part of the workforce’s process was to examine and report on circumstances in jail kitchens. To allow me to undertake the work, I needed to do a substantial amount of analysis and information gathering to allow me to hold out this operate. Meals dealing with and hygiene being simply one of many primary areas to cowl. Meals preparation methods, balanced diets, specialist medical diets and spiritual diets are all a part of the every day lifetime of a jail, or certainly every other sort of institutional kitchen.

Each jail in Britain is inspected by an unbiased physique, HM Jail Inspectorate, on an irregular foundation. Subsequently, it’s important that each jail kitchen is organized, maintained and managed on the very highest customary always. Within the late 1980’s, HM Jail Service misplaced the protection of, “Crown Immunity”. This prevented any type of prosecution by the courts for any infringements of the regulation. The ‘Crown’ might by no means prosecute itself – The Crown verses The Crown. In impact, it meant {that a} jail might now obtain extreme sanctions for poor efficiency in any space, significantly Well being & Security and catering. It might additionally imply that the jail kitchen might even be closed down if discovered to be in a poor state of administration, upkeep or hygiene. This was highlighted very clearly in September of 2009 when 370 prisoners at London’s largest jail, HMP Wandsworth, have been struck down with salmonella poisoning. If a jail kitchen have been immediately ordered to shut down, you possibly can think about the chaos this could trigger. HMP Wandsworth is the biggest jail in Western Europe and holds over 1,600 prisoners. How do you present over 4,800 meals a day at very brief discover? The one hope of protecting the roof on the jail is to make sure that the Emergency Contingency Planners have accomplished their homework and another system could be introduced on line with quick impact.

Wandsworth Jail was inbuilt 1851. It was one of many earliest London prisons and was initially known as the Surrey Home of Corrections. Mayhew & Binney, of their 1868 version of, “Legal Prisons of London”, describe vividly the life contained in the London prisons within the 1800’s. Meals didn’t appear very excessive on the agenda of the jail system at the moment. Containment gave the impression to be the precedence. The Surrey Home of Correction was certainly constructed to assist to scale back overcrowding on the Homes of Correction at Brixton, Guildford and Kingston, the place “jail fever” was rampant and prisoners have been dying. When inspecting the Surrey Home of Corrections in 1862, Mayhew and Binney famous the menu and diets of the varied lessons of prisoners held on the jail. Convicted prisoners employed at ‘arduous labour’ for phrases exceeding 21 days have been allowed the next meals:

Breakfast 1 pint of oatmeal gruel and 6 oz of bread

Dinner Sunday & Thursday 1 pint of soup and eight oz of bread

Dinner Tuesday & Saturday 3 oz of cooked meat with out bone 8 oz bread ½ lb potatoes

Dinner Monday, Wednesday & Friday 8 oz bread and 1 lb of potatoes

Supper Identical as breakfast

As you might properly think about, the low calorific and dietary values of such a weight-reduction plan would result in severe well being issues – jail fever.

After I labored at Excessive Down Excessive Safety jail in Surrey, we offered the Lord Lieutenant of the County with a framed copy of the recipe for Gruel. The Governor of the jail on the time, Stephen Prior, took the Lord Lieutenant and his spouse residence for dinner, and guess what was first on the menu – jail gruel. He truly beloved it! A lot in order that he instructed his personal chef so as to add it to his banquet menus to impress his visitors (I wager it did!).

That is the unique recipe from the Surrey Home of Corrections kitchen circa. 1862:

Substances for Soup and Gruel: The soup to include, per pint, 3 ounces of cooked meat, with out bone, 3 ounces of potatoes, 1 ounce of barley, rice, or oatmeal, and 1 ounce of onions or leeks, with pepper and salt. The gruel to include 2 ounces of oatmeal per pint. The gruel on alternate days to be sweetened with three quarter ounces of molasses or sugar and seasoned with salt.

In seasons when the potato crop has failed, 4 ounces of break up peas made right into a pudding could also be sometimes substituted; however the change should not be made greater than twice in every week. Boys beneath 14 years of age to be positioned on the identical weight-reduction plan as females.

The feminine weight-reduction plan was the identical because the male prisoner weight-reduction plan with the exception that the place the male acquired 8 oz of bread the feminine would obtain 6 ounces.

For these prisoners serving lower than seven days, the menu was very primary:

Breakfast 1 pint of gruel

Dinner 1 lb of bread

Supper 1 pint of gruel

These jail diets lasted properly into the 1900’s and bear no comparability to at the moment’s jail meals. Fashionable prisoners would not stand for it and the authorities might by no means permit it. Even the punishment weight-reduction plan of bread and water was faraway from the Jail Guidelines within the 1960’s. The time period, “Doing Porridge” nonetheless stays an avid description of somebody who’s in jail, referring in fact, to the previous weight-reduction plan of oatmeal gruel.

How it’s now

Fashionable man requires round 2,500 energy every day to keep up physique weight, girls require barely much less. Within the prisons of the 1800’s, a prisoner was fortunate to acquire 500 energy per day with none alternative to extend his consumption. Overcrowding – three to a cell constructed for one and arduous labour, quickly consumed what little power the prisoner had. Poor well being, physique lice and unsanitary circumstances all led to the onset of jail fever – epidemic typhus.

Right now, in addition to acquiring a balanced and wholesome jail weight-reduction plan, a prisoner can complement his weight-reduction plan from the jail store. Many prisoners are housed in single cells or dormitories and the overcrowding issues of the 1800’s not exist in our trendy prisons. Fashionable well being care programmes, bodily health programmes and trendy sanitatary circumstances have all been launched in recent times.

Within the UK, a jail catering supervisor has about £1.87 ($4) to supply meals for every inmate day-after-day. Younger offender establishments are allowed double this quantity at £3.81 ($8) per day. The trendy jail service of day has positioned an emphasis on rehabilitation, though how profitable this has been is debatable. A part of the rehabilitation course of is to show prisoners methods to eat healthily and take care of themselves on launch. For the jail service’s half, new dietary rules have been launched in recent times which keep away from the onset of well being issues which in the end mirror within the prisons well being care price range. Long run prisoners are significantly in danger by poor weight-reduction plan and poor well being care regimes. Diabetes, stroke and obesity-related sicknesses are of specific concern.

Particular diets are catered for now and embrace Muslim, kosher, Caribbean, diabetic and different medical diets are additionally supplied. Catering managers are actually specifically educated to arrange these particular diets.

In most of the institutions I labored in, we even had Muslim and Jewish prisoners working within the kitchen to make sure that the meals was cooked and ready within the acceptable manner. For the feast of Eid, the native mosques would ship specifically ready meals as a present for Muslim prisoners. Likewise, the rabbi would prepare for kosher meals to be delivered at any time when Jewish feast days have been celebrated. This could by no means have occurred fifty years in the past. It’s also curios to notice, the variety of prisoners who convert to Islam when Ramadan is approaching.

So how have the diets and menus modified over time. Well being and diet stay a excessive precedence in at the moment’s jail kitchen. There was an unlimited discount in fried meals over latest years. Chips with the whole lot not applies. A rise in recent fruit and greens, wholegrain merchandise and a rise in fish merchandise, together with oily fish have been launched into prisons not solely in Britain however in European and American jail institutions as properly.

The most effective fed prisons on the planet is in Italy, the place prisoners work to provide natural fruit and greens, together with olive oil. The jail has its personal state-of-the-art meals manufacturing areas for manufacturing wine and orchard administration. The entire operation is supervised by an expert administration workforce. The prisoners profit by consuming all their very own residence grown meals and are even allowed a small wine allowance to assist scale back levels of cholesterol and will even improve the flexibility to forestall some types of most cancers. Now, is that progress or what?

There appears to be some confusion as to what precisely jail meals entails. So far as most of the people is worried, a few of them nonetheless imagine that gruel, bread and water continues to be the primary jail weight-reduction plan. There are nonetheless many extra who say that it needs to be.

They might not be farther from the very fact. As we’ve already said, huge enhancements have already been made to the jail weight-reduction plan. In most prisons in England and Wales, the provision of catering services has been privatised. Prisoners now have a selection which they will preselect on a weekly foundation, often with a selection of three or extra essential programs. The Christmas menus have improved immensely over time and now present prisoners with a a lot better Christmas dinner than they ever would eat exterior jail. In most of the decrease safety prisons, native pensioners are invited into the jail to eat Christmas dinner with the inmates. In spite of everything, prisoners are nonetheless human beings and lots of take nice pains to make sure that ‘granny’ and ‘granddad’ have a pleasant Christmas dinner.

So how may a contemporary jail menu look? First, the breakfast menu. In all English prisons every prisoner receives a breakfast pack which is issued the night earlier than to be used the following morning. This can embrace a breakfast cereal, milk, tea baggage, espresso whitener, sugar, brown or white bread, jam and margarine or butter sort unfold. They may even obtain a weekly allowance of teabags and sugar to make themselves a cup of tea at any time when they wish to. Every cell may have its personal kettle. The every day subject may even embrace particular packs for vegans, vegetarians and numerous non secular teams.

For the noon and night meals, almost each jail now makes use of a pre-select system the place an inventory of various meals are displayed for every day and each prisoner can order no matter meal he prefers. There are often 5 – 6 alternate options to select from. Recent greens and fruit are served individually when every meal is collected.

The next is only a pattern obtained from the London prisons the place the pre-select system has efficiently been in operation for almost ten years:

Day one

Noon meal Night meal

Vegetarian Pasta Bake Vegetable supreme

Rooster & Mushroom pie Rooster Supreme

Halal Jamaican Beef Patti Halal Rooster Curry

Corned beef & Pickle Roll Grilled Gammon

Jacket Potato & Coleslaw Pork pie salad

Day Two

Vegetable Pancake roll Bean & Vegetable curry

Breaded fish Rooster Chasseur

Cheese & Beano Grill Halal Beef Casserole

Cheese & Tomato Roll Fish in Parsley Sauce

Jacket Potato & Tuna Vegetable Quiche Salad

Day Three

Vegetarian Sausage & Egg Soya Lasagne

Bacon, Sausage & Egg Minced Beef Lasagne

Halal Sausage & Egg Halal Beef Italienne

Turkey Salad Roll Rice & Bean Stuffed Pepper Salad

Jacket Potato and Curried Beans Cheese Salad

The pre-select system has progressed a great distance since its introduction. Prisoners now have the chance to pick from a spread of decisions. Within the early days if you weren’t a registered vegetarian, you might not have a vegetarian meal. If you weren’t a Muslim, you could not choose a halal dish. Now, issues have modified Prisoners can choose no matter dish they like. They might eat vegetarian at some point, halal the following. Its their selection. Generally, all prisons have now tried to embrace the Stability of Good Well being mannequin (Meals Requirements Company 2001) and are offering a nutritionally balanced, and nutritious diet.

Now we have progressed a great distance from the times of bread and water and a cup of gruel. Prisoners are usually not dying of typhus and malnutrition any extra and prisons are far more snug and wholesome paces to work in – each for prisoners and employees.

What would be the subsequent part? Will we see the introduction of self catering for prisoners? Every jail having its personal grocery store. All prisons have there personal model of the ‘nook store’ the place they will buy meals dietary supplements and little luxuries to make life extra bearable. It isn’t an excessive amount of of a step to supply a grocery store and the means for prisoners to arrange their very own meals. A lot of the catering services and jail outlets are already privatised. I’m positive that ASDA or Sainsbury’s or Walmart would soar on the probability of getting an in-prison retailer with a captive clientele of almost 2000 day-after-day.

LATEST BREAKING NEWS: How a couple of connoisseur restaurant with all-time low costs, excellently reviewed by the monetary occasions meals critic Charles Campion? Effectively, it is occurred. Excessive Down Jail close to London has turn out to be the primary jail institution to open a connoisseur restaurant inside a jail – and its open to the general public. All of the kitchen employees are prisoners beneath coaching to be cooks prepared for launch and discovering employment within the catering commerce. Test it out. You may be shocked.