And an organic farmer with reform on his mind.
By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
The investigative journalist James Ridgeway, who died last month, was relentlessly devoted to exposing corruption and abuse in America's most powerful institutions. But the one he devoted his last years to investigating was one of our nation's most entrenched and troubled: the prison system. |
Through the organization he co-founded, Solitary Watch, Ridgeway and his colleagues received thousands of messages and first hand accounts from prisoners subjected to solitary confinement. Those accounts, along with extensive reporting, made it clear: The sanctioned cruelty of "the hole" often amounts to torture, and can have a devastating impact on human beings that the state claims it wants to rehabilitate. |
Ridgeway's legacy is part of an increasingly urgent body of critical literature on our criminal justice and prison systems, which have ethical problems that are deeply woven together with inequality and racism that, because they occur out of public view, remain mostly hidden. |
In an Op-Ed today, the latest in Opinion's Fixes series, which focuses on solutions to social problems, the former Times reporter Patricia Leigh Brown takes on one of those hidden punishments: prison food. |
We may be repulsed by the unhealthy, flavorless, sometimes spoiled slop that ends up on an inmate's plastic tray (one inmate likened a typical county jail meal to a "ground-up gym mat with a little bit of seasoning") but grasping the harm and dehumanization that can result from being served thousands of these "meals" is harder. Even when edible, Brown writes, the food prisoners are served is "high on refined carbohydrates, sodium and sugar and low on nutrients — diets the rest of us have been told to avoid." |
The physical, emotional and psychological damage that diets like this can cause is well-documented, and many organizations, like Impact Justice, whose report on prison food Brown references, see it as a human rights issue. |
So what's the fix? To start, Brown looks to the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine, which has a farming program that puts inmates to work growing and preparing fresh, healthful food for the prison. The program not only contributes to better health but provides skills to inmates — in farming, nutrition and food preparation — that many have used to get jobs outside once they have served their terms. |
Of course, one small farm program isn't a solution to a systemwide problem. As Brown points out, despite programs like the one at Mountain View, progress elsewhere is being made at a "glacial pace." But that should not prevent us from learning what can happen when a few people get together to till the soil and plant seeds of change. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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