JOHN KIRIAKOU: Poison in Prison
March 10, 2021
A private food service company "accidentally" sold dog food to feed
prisoners mis-marked as "ground beef for tacos." There was no punishment for
the company or its executives.
A federal prison in Littleton, Colorado, 2011. (Vetatur Fumare, Flickr, CC
BY-SA 2.0)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
A friend recently forwarded to me an article from The New York Times which
talked about a group of Maine state prisoners who have taken to raising
their own fruits and vegetables in the prison yard because there was
literally no healthy or nourishing food provided to them by prison
authorities. One prisoner likened the daily meal to "a ground up gym mat
with spices." The article said:
"Of the seemingly endless tally of injustices of mass incarceration, one of
the worst humiliations gets little attention from outside: the food. This
shadow issue - the 3,000 bologna sandwiches, mystery meats slathered on
white bread, soy filler masquerading as chicken and other culinary
indignities consumed during a prison sentence - permeates life behind bars
and instills a nearly universal sense of disgust."
Prison food is high on refined carbohydrates, sodium and sugar and low on
nutrients - diets the rest of us have been told to avoid. Like everything
about prisons, it disproportionately affects people of color, and it has
grown worse during the pandemic. With most states spending $3 or less per
person a day for meals, penitentiaries have become hidden food deserts,
paralleling the neighborhoods from which many inmates have come."
I can tell you definitively that this is true. My first full day in prison
after blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program was a Friday "fish
day." One of the members of the "Italian contingent" warned me on my way to
the cafeteria. "Don't eat the fish. We call it sewer trout. We're not
even sure if it's fish." When I got to the cafeteria and got in line, I saw
cases stacked up behind the servers. They were in plain view and were
clearly marked, "Alaskan Cod-Product of China-Not for Human Consumption-Feed
Use Only." I threw lunch away.
Mid-Week 'Tacos'
Pet food aisle in New York, 2007. (Jeffrey O. Gustafson, CC-BY-SA-2.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Wednesdays in all federal prisons are "Mexican food days" and dinner is
always what authorities call "tacos." They're unlike any tacos I've ever
seen. I realized why when I read an article in Prison Legal News magazine,
a publication of the Human Rights Defense Center. It said that, "a private
food service company, John Soules Foods Inc., 'accidentally' sold dog food
to prisons to be fed to prisoners mismarked as 'ground beef' for tacos."
There was no punishment for the company or its executives, other than a
$392,000 fine, the cost of the investigation, paid to the U.S. Treasury.
Prisoners got nothing. Not even an apology. And the shame of the story is
that nobody could even tell that it was dog food. It tasted the same as
everything else prisoners are served.
In the two years I was in prison, for example, I never saw the crown of a
stalk of broccoli. Prisoners only get stems and only fruits and vegetables
that are so damaged and ugly that they can't possibly be sold in a grocery
store. "Special meals," like those on Thanksgiving and Christmas, called
for a "selection of holiday pies," according to the prisoner handbook.
Well, the selection of holiday pies was a chocolate "Cliff Bar" that had
expired a year earlier.
"Nobody could even tell that it was dog food. It tasted the same as
everything else prisoners are served."
Once we got bagels. But they were all dyed green from the previous year's
St. Patrick's Day, they hadn't sold, and they had been frozen for a year.
Things got so bad that one Iraqi prisoner and I once scoured the prison yard
for dandelions, with which we made a salad with stolen olive oil from the
cafeteria and salt and pepper. It was the only salad I had in two years.
And I had to eat it secretly, lest I be sent to solitary.
The Warden in Maine
With that said, there's a relatively easy fix to all this. The New York
Times article that I cited above introduces us to the warden of a Maine
state prison, Randall Liberty. Liberty is the son of a former prisoner who
grew up on public assistance and who became a master certified gardener and
beekeeper.
When he became a warden, the article says, he was "horrified" to learn that
leftover food was being thrown away every day. He introduced a class to
teach prisoners how to compost, and he immediately instituted a mandatory
composting policy. This resulted in a fertile two-and-a-half acre garden
that now produces much of the prison's food, including 77,000 pounds of
apples annually.
Many are consumed in-house, and all the excess is sent to neighboring
prisons. The program saves millions of dollars a year and it keep prisoners
healthy, busy, and learning how to farm. There's literally no downside. So
why isn't every prison doing this?
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act-a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.
