Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Prison Food

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Prison food is kind of a joke, like airplane food. But there are real consequences involved. Let's get into it in today's short stuff. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff, the shortest stuff around. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry over there, and this is Short Stuff, in case you didn't catch it

the first time around. Right, let's talk about prison food. Yeah, let's. So prison food, saying prison food is sort of like a joke, like an airplane meal that someone might use casually to represent really bad food. I think prisoners would literally kill for an airplane food meal once in a while.

But there are more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and that's a lot of people to feed. And we're not feeding them very well, and there are groups out there that advocates for prisoners who are on the case and have been for a while trying to get better food to prisoners. And this woman, Loretta Rafay, who works for, she's a researcher for Prison Voice Washington,

she makes a good point, she's saying, listen, we're not saying prisoners don't want filet mignon, they don't want luxury foods, they just want food that's food, real food. Real food, and that also isn't like nutritionally deficient, you know? And let's get something out of the way, if you're like, well, they're prisoners,

who cares if they have tasty food or something like that, or something that's not as high in sodium? Who cares? They're in prison, they're not supposed to be coddled. There's actually a really good answer to that, and that is that if we are taking care of prisoners in a certain way in prison, and again, there's 2 million of them in the United States alone,

if they're eating terribly over the course of years, they're also developing the kinds of chronic illnesses that come with eating terribly for years, like heart disease, and COPD, and just about everything you can think of, diabetes. And then when they get out, they need healthcare, or they need healthcare while they're in there too. And so whether they're on government-assisted

healthcare on the outside, or prison healthcare on the inside, you, the guy who doesn't care whether they get good food or not on the inside, is paying for that, and a really easy way to get around that is for them to just be served nutritious food to begin with. It's way cheaper than paying for healthcare on the back end. Yeah, there was a study done in 2012 that reported

that 74% of inmates in state and federal prisons and jails are obese, overweight, obese, or morbidly obese. And I guess it is easy to say, like, why give them good food? They are in prison, we should give them gross-tasting food. But like you said, it's not, it's one of these things, like if you think about the big picture of one of your arguments is tax dollars, tax dollars,

why am I paying for this? You're gonna be paying for more down the line, so maybe give them some fruits and vegetables every now and then, or on a daily basis even, like human beings. And I mean, if you're talking tax dollars and you're paying for their food, like the amount of money that's spent on prisoners,

if you look at it overall for the entire nation, I can't find that data, by the way. There's no data that says this is how much the US spends on food for prisoners every year. There's nothing like that. It's more by state, even by jurisdiction. But I've seen something between $1.20 a day to about $3 a day per prisoner.

The average American eats on about $8.12 a day. So there is a very small amount of money being spent on prisoner food, which is one problem. But then the second problem that seems to be evolving over the years, or has evolved recently, is there used to be prison kitchens. Like the food was prepared there in the prison. And so that meant that the prison could kind of

cater more toward inmates than they can now, where the food preparation is almost exclusively outsourced to companies like Aremark. Or in Washington, there's one called Corrections Institution's Food. And that's just a food service. So it's prepared offsite, and it's just gotten really, really bad.

Like there's no such thing as fresh food anymore. It's all reheated in like a tray, basically. All right, well let's come back in a minute. We'll talk a little bit more about that and some of the other complications of feeding 2 million incarcerated individuals right after this. We'll see you next time. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called

David Lashher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

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Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so it is tough to feed that many people and keep expenses in check. I think anyone will admit you can't just have

an open checkbook and just say, it's been whatever it takes. There are budgets to keep in mind, and it's complicated when you think about, and this is something I don't think many people think about, but dietary needs, dietary restrictions based on your own body or religious grounds, whether it's kosher or halal or gluten-free, like I never thought about what if you're gluten

or dairy-free and you're in prison, you probably just go hungry a lot, or live with consistent intestinal distress. Which would really suck, you know, like that's a, I saw a quote, it's like, prison's punishment enough, you know, like this doesn't need to be heaped on top of it, something like persistent intestinal distress, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's, you're certainly not making

for more obedient prisoners if someone is always sick. No, but I did look up, I wondered if there was a reason that prisons deprived inmates nutritionally to keep them like docile, or if it has the opposite effect, but apparently one of the big problems, at least in Washington, but I would suspect it's probably nationwide, is a deficiency of protein. There's just not enough protein,

and protein's pretty important, and it's one of the big ones that you really need. So there's less protein, the protein that is typically served to prisoners is hyper-processed. There's no fresh vegetables or anything like that, it's all like pre-canned or cooked or frozen or something like that, and it's heavy in salt and sometimes sugar too.

Just basically the worst food you could possibly eat, like junk food made from filler. Yeah, and if you do have dietary restrictions that have health implications, like let's say you are gluten-free or have celiac, they will just take whatever has gluten off of your tray, they don't say like, well, how would you like this instead? Right.

And you just get less food. Yeah, that sucks, man. Yeah, it does, and you talked about how much they're spending. In Maricopa County, Arizona is very famous for Sheriff Joe and all the news he makes, and apparently they're Thanksgiving meal. There's a non-profit journalism group

called the Marshall Project that works on criminal justice issues. They did some investigating and found that the Thanksgiving meal in Maricopa County cost 56 cents per person. It was a cup of carrots, a cup of mashed potatoes, and then five ounces of turkey soil, sorry, turkey soy casserole.

Turkey soil, probably not too far off, actually. I agree. One of the people who are with one of the prison projects said if you look at a can of organic cat food and the label of the ingredients, and you compare it to a lot of the food that's served in prisons, the organic cat food is preferable to the prison food,

which is fairly shameful. But what about the honey buns? There's the honey buns. I also saw a recent one about a type of potato chip that is apparently so good that prisoners go crazy after they get out of prison because they can't find it outside of prison. It's made specifically for prisons.

It's called the whole shebangs, and this company has caught on recently that people really want this outside of prison, so now they sell it on their website as well, but it's really expensive on their website. But it's just supposedly the greatest potato chips you can ever have. It's a combination of salt and vinegar

and barbecue flavor. Well, but again, I mean, if you haven't heard our prison's episode, that's the reference to honey buns, apparently they have a lot of trade value, but jokes aside, honey buns and even the greatest potato chips ever still junk food, you know?

Yeah, honey buns and greatest potato chips ever, and definitely still do qualify as junk food in Crete. And again, I know this is a divisive topic about how people treat prisoners. There are a lot of people think that they are pampered and they should all be in hard labor camps eating junk food, but again, if you really look at the big picture

and if you're worried about your tax dollars and where they're going, you're spending a lot more on healthcare by feeding them bad food than just giving them some, and again, they're not asking for filet mignon, but fruits and vegetables, real proteins that isn't just like a heaping of beans. Yeah, just to put it in real numbers,

the prison policy initiative, which is a watchdog group, they did a study and they found that correctional facilities spend about six times more on healthcare than they do on food. And again, if you just raise the quality of food up, it would definitely not be six times more, you know? I do know. You got anything else for this episode of short stuff, Chuck?

I got nothing else. I'm just gonna go sit down and have some turkey ends. And soil, turkey soil protein. Yeah, turkey ends was one of the ingredients in turkey a la king, which I tried to look up what that was. And the only thing I could find that wasn't, you know, the country of turkey ends blank was that it's the ends of a turkey roll.

Which in and of itself doesn't sound like much of a turkey anyway. Although I can tell you a turkey roll is really good. Is it? Oh yeah. I don't think I've ever had one. They come, they're super frozen, solid as a brick in a foil pan.

And you put the whole thing in the oven for like three hours. But when it comes out, buddy, whoa, salty. Oh, I bet. It's tasty though. You shouldn't eat them very often. As a matter of fact, I should probably not endorse them at all. Well, at any rate, that's the end of this short stuff.

Hope it changed your mind about things. Until next time, short stuff out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.