I’ve seen several prison shows(Lockdown and so forth) that show how prisons feed such a large quantity of people on a shoestring budget. Basically, society does not want to pay a fortune to feed these people, so they all eat extremely cheap and crap food for their meals.
The thing is, some of these guys look like they are eating 3000 calories a day, at least. It doesn’t look like prisons provide that kind of caloric intake.
Is the food unlimited in prison? Can you get seconds and thirds?
Are they eating extra food that is not prison provided? If so, how do they get this food?
Just because a food is cheap, does not necesarily mean that it is crap. It might not taste good, but I understand there are laws that require a certain level of caloric intake be provided for each prisoner.
In addition, most prisons have a commisary that they can purchase items in. I don’t know if this extends to extra food stuffs, but it’s certainly possible.
I’m sure Dr. Mercotan will be along to answer with some facts, being that he’s a- a doctor, and b- works in a prison…
If McDonalds has taught us anything, it’s that you can gain weight on a diet of cheap unhealthy food.
Food in prison is rationed. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet. You’re given a certain amount when you go through the line and that’s it.
You can obtain extra food. You can buy it in the prison commissary or through the mail or your family can drop if off on visits. Or you can just beat up a smaller guy and take his food.
Contrary to what the crunchy-granola-organic-vegetable crowd would have you believe, people can live just fine on “low grade”, cheap food provide there are sufficient calories, protein, and vitamins/minerals in there somewhere. It won’t be gourmet, but it will sustain a body.
Add some exercise on top of that - whether in a yard, in a weight room, or calisthenics in your cell - and a motivated prisoner can remain muscular and healthy. Not everyone will want to do that, of course, but it is certainly possible.
I don’t know about Dr. Mercotan’s workplace, but I used to know the guy who had the contract to supply my local county’s jail commisary with Little Debbie snacks and the like. Quite a lucrative thing, really - he bought a high performance 4-seat Piper airplane with the proceeds. So, the answer to “can inmates buy additional food?” is yes, at least in some places. If you consider things like snack cakes to be “food”.
I have worked for my agency in prisons here in Melbourne Australia and our prisoners have ready access to white bread and jam etc. in between the cheap stodgy starchy meals. They can also spend their $6 a day wages on chocolate if they want though most spend it on tobacco, either to smoke or trade. The prisoners will tell you that men leave prison buff due to the social emphasis on weight training, women leave fat due to the diet without the exercise.
The differences between the culture in the prisons is quite fascinating. One woman told me she put on 60kg during her last 3 year stretch and wants the prison to start using clothing that doesn’t just stretch with you to keep awareness of the changing body shape. I have never been in a men’s unit without some fitness equipment available whenever you aren’t locked in your cell or at work/study, usually a weight machine plus exercise bike etc. whereas in the women’s prison there is a gym that you can choose to go to during your recreation time but reportedly it is really scary for those who are not at the butch end of the spectrum so most sit around eating bread and smoking. They do not have the same access to equipment or a culture that encourages its use.
It may surprise you, but one of the most widely abused drugs in prisons are steroids.
These are not tested for in the mandatory tests either, we tend to be more concerned about what we in the UK call Class A drugs, and some class B drugs.
I do not ever recall a prisoner being disciplined for possessing them as a specific charge, only on the much more general charge of ‘being in possession of an unauthorised article’ - which is something of a catch all.
Prisoners can spend money - or rather credit - from their prison work earnings, and most of them can also take receipt of funds sent in by familes or named individuals - the rules governing who can send in what and their sending address are pretty strict.
You don’t generally need protein shakes and so forth to gain muscle. An average diet is perfectly fine. Eat your vegetables, drink a couple glasses more of low-fat milk, and do some lifting, and you can gain muscle.
Back in the seventies and eighties, a lot of very good powerlifters came out of American prisons - Jim Williams, Don Blue, and some others.
Most of the hype about vitamins and protein for lifters comes from people with vitamins and protein to sell.
A friend of mine who is a jail guard here in Canada told me that there was no weight lifting stuff in the gym at all in the prison he works in, something about making it easier to handle the prisoners.
Weight training is a huge part of prison culture and has been for a long time. The guards don’t want to deal with jacked-up ‘superconvicts’, but removing the weight equipment would be taking away one of their few pleasures that can actually improve one aspect of convicts’ lives, and would certainly lead to problems. Maybe not a full-blown riot, but the convicts who lift would definitely make their displeasure known. A friend of mine who worked as a prison guard told me that the attitude is “look the other way for minor infractions, give the guys something to keep them quiet”. In a compromise, most prisons no longer have a budget for weight training equipment, and the weights that are still there are no longer maintained or replaced when they break (yes, cast iron can break). This leads to inmates making makeshift repairs on the weights, duct taping a 5lb plate to a 30lb dumbbell to make a 35lb dumbbell, etc.
That is interesting, on the units here they have cable machines with all the handles padlocked on instead of the usual snap locks, free weights would be pretty scary to have around. In the last couple of years they have put a cable machine on the women’s prison farm (it could be seen in the background in a doco, I didn’t notice but two ex prisoners did and were furious it wasn’t available during their time) which fascinates me as on the farm most prisoners should be getting plenty of hard physical work yet they must have identified a physical or psychological advantage in providing the equipment or it wouldn’t be there. I have no idea if it gets any use of course.
I believe that your basic assumptions are wrong. Prisons achieve savings and lower costs through ‘economy of scale’, meaning that they contract with suppliers in huge amounts and long term contracts that keep costs low.
Much like schools, the military and other government run programs that house and feed people.
Not by feeding prisoners “extremely cheap and crap food.” It is not in the best interests of the program to maintain a prison full of always hungery, possibly violent individuals.
Unless your a competitive bodybuilder you do not need as much protein as the magazines and health clubs would lead you to believe.
You need about 1 gram of protein per KILOGRAM (not pound) of weight
So I weigh about 170 pounds now. That’s roughly 77 kilograms. So I need about 77 grams of protein per day. I have a nice muscular body on that.
A person can only gain between 12 and 15 pounds of muscle per year without the use of steriods or other drugs. Anything else will be fat.
Of course depending on body type that extra fat may still look good.
Prisons easily provide the needed protein to get muscular from daily meals.
In the old days prisons and workhouse and the such would provide gruels which sound and probably taste awful but were actually very good for you.
When we send food aid to foreign countries we don’t send them all sorts of nice food, we send them soy based, vitamin enriched gruel that can be mixed with water to make a complete and balanced food. That is all they every need to eat.
Too often now people get it into their heads that certain foods are magically good and others are bad. Take orange juice. It’s CAN be good for you, but it’s really just sugar water with some vitamins thrown in, and maybe some fiber, depending on how you buy it or if you strain that out.
If you’re taking a mulitvitamin a day, you’re already getting the vitamins so drinking the OJ is not doing you any good. Might as well give it up and drink water.
According to an old associate of mine, the guys to watch are not the power lifters, most of whom want to look dangerous. The real problem in the prison he supervised was runners. They had a track, 1/4 mile oval, cinder. You had to wait to use the weight room, but you could run your entire exercise period. (not a supermax or even close, just a old country prison)
He said there were guys who ran flat out, no jogging or doing distance pace, but sprint as hard as they could, for twenty or thirty minutes. OK, so he says they slowed down a lot as they went on, but he said they were trying full out the whole way. If that isn’t escape attempt training, I don’t know what is. He told me about one guy who used to try to do it carrying stuff, as well, but for some obscure reason I don’t remember that was against the rules.
I can’t speak to modern prisons, but when I toured Alcatraz, the guide (a National Park Ranger) said the mess served comfort food, cheap but tasty and plentiful, because the authorities realized that well-fed, satisfied convicts were less likely to fight or make other trouble.
Prisons here have had more than a few murders committed with free weights, so their use was restricted. Prisoners improvise sandbags and the like instead. Prisoners’ capacity to improvise is limitless - they are no less imaginative than the guys in Colditz and the Stalags, just rottener. Toothbrushes get sharpened into shivs, a sock full of cakes of soap becomes a functional cosh, etc.
In any event, they can always use their own bodies as the weight by doing chinups, pushups and the like.
You can’t prevent prisoners working out in some form, and there may be advantages in having equipment available to them so that it is more easily observed and supervised. The downside is that such equipment, like all equipment in prison, becomes an opportunity for the expression of power among the prisoners. Someone will quickly enough decide that it is his privilege to control who gets to use the machine.
Institutional facilities are mandated by law to provide adequate nutritional sustenance, which (as others have pointed out) can be done very cheaply. In fact, one of the best ways to lose weight & get into shape is to spend a few months behind bars…though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.