The Prison Food Survey

Never before in my twenty-four years of prison living has the Missouri Department of Corrections asked those of us in its custody to take a survey—until this week. The interactive form appeared on prisoners' tablets on Tuesday morning. It asked us to rate the temperature, portions sizes, and general quality of the meals we're served, and for me, it posed a real dilemma: in what way should I answer the question How would you rate the overall taste and flavor of the lunch menu?

How, indeed.

There's no question, Texas has it worse. According to an article in the February 2023 issue of News Inside, "meager improvements" in the Lone Star State's notoriously awful prison food were short lived. Between May of 2020 and when the article went to print, Texas prisons were still struggling to serve fresh fruit and bread without mold on it. Our diet here in Missouri prisons isn't raw-potato bad, but it's no picnic.

Bringing Texas into this little diatribe isn't what-aboutism. I'm saying only that the problem is widespread, not that its equally distributed. The Missouri DOC contracts with Aramark, a food service giant that's in institutions of all kinds, all around the country, and exercises what seems to be minimal oversight of its (for lack of a better word) franchises.

ERDCC's food service department has many problems, one of them being roaches. It would help if someone cleaned—at least by wiping counters or mopping the dining hall's greasy floors once in a while. Finding workers who won't use their prodigious downtime to smoke synthetic marijuana at the tables would help with that. Too bad no one—neither guard nor Aramark employee—displays any willingness to enforce the rules.

Whole logs of ground beef routinely leave the dining hall in unsearched wheelchairs. Meanwhile, line-jumpers snatch their second, third, and sometimes fourth extra trays right in front of the guards stationed at the serving window. Many times, the kitchen runs out of something and has to make a last-minute substitution. For entrées, this is usually turkey loaf or bologna. When a vegetable side runs out, someone just adds lukewarm water to mashed potato mix. A bruised and unripe apple usually fills in for desserts. No one likes any of this. Predictably, the survey doesn't ask how often we're served the food we're actually supposed to get.

Imposing a teensy bit of accountability would improve this environment for everyone. I suppose it's easier in the short run not to care.

As I answered the survey, I felt acutely aware of the grace I was affording Aramark. Most of the people taking it are probably going to rate everything a 1 out of 5, just to be spiteful. I kept wanting to ask, "Compared to what?" I suppose there's always Texas.

Preparing to Leave

George stares at the monitor, whispering the words onscreen as he reads them. His hooded, watery eyes follow the cursor right, then down and left, then right again, line by line, as he uses the mouse to follow every word of the exercise prompt.

This is George's first time at a computer in years. He said that the last time was in a computer literacy class he took at a different prison, all the way back in the '90s. Before that, decades of wild living had brought him no contact with the digital realm. As I took a seat beside him at the keyboard, ready to guide him along, I asked how much of the class he still remembered.

"I know how to do this." He jiggled the mouse back and forth. "That's about it."

Clearly, George and I were in for a journey. But of course, preparing for a parole date isn't easy for anyone.

At the moment, George still lives in one of the good-conduct wings here at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. Both of us came down as very young men. No stretch of language or imagination could qualify us as that now. I observed my twenty-fourth anniversary in the system this year. George's time inside amounts to nearly double that. Each of us have traveled a long, rough road, but at seventy-one, George is finally nearing the end of it. He's being released on parole in November.

With less than a year left to serve, George qualifies for services from the Reentry Center, the new facility within ERDCC's fences, where residents can come for career exploration classes, housing assistance, post-release benefits, and more. (I blogged about the Reentry Center here.) Imagine a modern career center—computers, job flyers, motivational slogans, and so on, then post a guard at the door—that's a fairly accurate picture. The state of Missouri opened this facility at ERDCC in May. A few weeks later, I became one of three prisoners to get a job there. That's how I met George.

He trundled in one Tuesday afternoon, wearing a white do-rag with the standard Missouri prisoner uniform of gray pants, a white T-shirt, and clunky, black 10-hole boots. He's a big guy, average height, but close to 300 pounds. It surprised me when he said how old he was. The man doesn't look a day over sixty.

My boss, the Employment Transition Supervisor, welcomed him and did a short interview to gauge George's needs. Probation and Parole approved his home plan, but how he's going to get by out there is another matter. More than anything, he wants a job. At his age, most Americans are retired and living off some combination of pensions, Social Security, or life savings.

"I wanna do bricklaying," he tells us. "Then, after a while, start my own concrete business—sidewalks, patios, porch steps—maybe do a little landscaping on the side."

He's someone I expect will work until he falls over dead, probably with a shovel in his hand.

My position at the Reentry Center encompasses many roles, from administrative assistant to guidance counselor. I'm also on hand to provide technical support. People sometimes have issues interacting with the web-based platform that examines their interests and skills, coaches them on interview techniques, then helps us create their resumes. I sit with every client for a little while at the outset of each exercise, to field any questions that come up.

When George asks about a dotted blue line under a phrase he's typed, I explain how grammar check works (and how it sometimes doesn't). When he misspells "experience," I show him the magic of right-clicking. When he inadvertently enlarges the browser viewport 300 percent, I point him to the zoom control. As eager as he is to progress, I'm hardly surprised by how quickly he catches on.

The early assignments encourage users to focus on personal strengths. A colorful illustration of a tree laden with different fruits prompts everyone to list their personal achievements. George thinks long and hard before answering. Another client needs help, so I walk away to let George contemplate his accomplishments for a bit. When I check on him again, I see that below an image of a shiny pear, he's typed, "Surviving prison."

"Wow," I say, impressed. "That's...."

Words fail me. I'm struck by this plainspoken truth. Not everyone in his position would be able to acknowledge the challenges that life in the system has posed. I've known too many people who, especially as the decades fell away, started accepting the banal horrors of prison life as "just how it is," as though the circumstances we struggle through are normal. Whether they did this out of denial, misplaced self-preservation, or fear is a personal matter. I just appreciate that George recognizes himself as a survivor and is neither cowed nor brainwashed by the trauma he's lived through.

I tell him so. He takes a deep breath and settles back in the chair. "You know, back at the old Walls"—what everybody today calls the now-decommissioned Missouri State Penitentiary—"they had a sign at the gate where you came in: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' Well, I never did. I never let 'em beat me down."

At three o'clock we gather our stuff and make to leave for the afternoon. As he tucks a folder full of notes under his arm, he voices concern for the future.

"You know, I been down thirty-six years now. It's a whole different world out there than the one I left. I ain't never used a cellphone, I don't know the internet..."

I cut him off. "We've got tablets, though. They run on Android, the same as half of the phones out there do. If you can operate a tablet, you can use a smartphone. As for the internet, didn't you know you were on it today?"

His eyebrows rise as he shoots me a doubtful look.

"The exercises you've been doing on there—those are all web pages. You can't go to other websites because of security settings, but when you use the computers here, you're actually online."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

Such a little thing, and yet he smiles, suddenly less anxious about rejoining the world. George is becoming a man with fresh hope—the one thing that everyone should leave prison with.

Four Books I Spent My Spring Reading

When the time came to choose what to read next, our book club facilitator suggested we pick up Alice McDermott's novel After This. He was teaching a course on Catholic literature at Saint Louis University and, with characteristic forthrightness, begged our mercy in selecting a book he was already teaching, rather than adding another book to his literary load. After This is a book he loves, he said, which sounded promising enough. Then he went on to say that it was the one book from the course that his students suggested he remove from next semester's syllabus. "They think it's boring," he said. Being the type of readers for whom such warnings arouse curiosity, we assented almost immediately.

This was my first encounter with McDermott. She writes beautifully at the level of the sentence, with prose rich in meaning without ever being ponderous. Plotwise, I can see why contemporary college students struggled with this book: they probably couldn't relate to the world it depicted. Spanning a period between the end of two wars, World War Two and Vietnam, After This has at its center an Irish-American family in search not of happiness—because wanting happiness, in these characters' deeply Catholic mindset, would constitute a kind of unseemly greed—but of simple contentedness. Just to be okay with how their lives are going seems to be their aim. Their saga unfolds episodically, in a series of vignettes, with years disappearing easily between sections. Its 277 pages flip past with almost a breeze.

Freed in May from an onerous work schedule, I did my best to make up for lost reading time, leaping straight into several books at once. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki in 1957. It includes texts previously published as 101 Zen Stories, The Gateless Gate (called Mumonkon in the original Japanese), 10 Bulls (maybe better known as the ox-herding pictures), and an ancient Sanskrit text entitled Centering that emerged in India 4,000 years ago, more than two millennia before Bodhidharma famously brought Zen teachings to China. Unlike McDermott's novel, I took extra time with this book, ingesting it in small, meditative bites that never overwhelmed my ability to sit awhile with a given story, koan, or passage.

When Freedom Reads visited ERDCC a couple of years ago, I had to know its representatives' answers to two questions. First: what one book each of them read during their imprisonment most resonated with them. Then: what book they recommend for others in these circumstances. One response to the second question was The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writers Life in Prison, edited by Caits Meissner. This essay collection was put out by PEN America a few years ago, forwarding the organization's mission to celebrate and elevate the literature of writers "whose voices have too often gone unheard or been ignored." The Sentences That Create Us collects inspiring pieces by justice-impacted writers—novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, memoirists, and everything in between—to reveal how prisoners whose minds remain free can create a different kind of life through their writing.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about Zen the way he taught it: simply and with a directness that matched his subject. His book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation was probably intended to be an introduction to the practice, for readers who were not yet intimate with the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Aggregates, the Paramitas, and other essential Buddhist teachings. Even though I've been practicing this stuff for a while, its good to go back to basics every so often and get a refresher. With straightforward pronouncements like "The person who has no compassion in him cannot be happy," and "Twenty-four hours are a treasure chest of jewels," Thich Nhat Hanh once again proves himself a teacher worthy of his beautiful reputation.

I'm not really sure where my reading will take me next. It's been so long since I had enough downtime from work to read much of anything. A visit to the prison's library is in order—my first in almost three years. Who knows what I might pick up.