The Missouri Department of Corrections Will Soon Privatize

Ready or not, Missouri, here comes Aramark! The company famously under nourishing schoolchildren and supplying concessions to sports venues nationwide now stands on the verge of taking over the food service departments of every prison in the state. Despite imposing an increased burden on taxpayers and inviting safety problems at the facility level, someone in Jefferson City seems to think this is a good idea. I have to wonder who at Aramark they're related to.

For a couple of months, rumors of a takeover ran like roaches through the dining hall. The scuttlebutt was that minimum-wage workers from the free world would soon handle all food preparation and service; therefore, prisoners currently working in the kitchen would need new jobs at the outset of 2023. People here are prone to catastrophizing, though, so as my tablemates howled about some company with multiple lawsuits taking over the ERDCC kitchen, I adopted my usual wait-and-see stance.

Everything was cleared up when an article about the proposed takeover appeared on the wall of my wing, photocopied from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch by a conscientious neighbor. (Prisoners sometimes do this as a public service when the news is pertinent.) The details were not encouraging.

According to the article, a $45 million contract will soon allow Aramark to provide food for prisoners in all of Missouri's prisons. Their estimated cost per meal is $1.77 but may change before the contract is finalized. Aramark will also offer free coffee to staff and sell food to prison employees and visitors. All this will take is a tax hike and everyone turning a blind eye to Aramark's questionable reputation. As it happens, the rumors about lawsuits might contain a kernel of truth. Two state corrections departments recently broke ties with Aramark, one saying that maggots were found in its kitchens, one alleging repeated food shortages, both claiming that Aramark periodically served rotten food. For whatever it's worth, certain state lawmakers question the soundness of outsourcing to a private company. Increased costs are one reason; dubious meal quality is another. How can it possibly be cost effective to let go the five or six state employees currently overseeing kitchen operations, just to bring in contracted supervisors to do the job? And who will watch the watchers and ensure that conditions here don't end up like those in Mississippi and Michigan, both of which kicked Aramark out? Years before coming to prison, I knew about the pitfalls of its privatization. I'd read enough horror stories about conditions at facilities run by Corrections Corporation of America (commonly referred to as CCA) and its ilk to deplore how people confined there are often treated. Violation of basic human decency should never be part of someone's sentence. Unfortunately, its hard to maintain ethical standards of operation when warders' primary concern is their own bottom line.

The Missouri DOC outsourced the processing of postal mail last year. Its medical services have for decades been contracted to one negligent company after another – first CMS, then Corizon, now Centurion, and that's just during my time in the system. Pretty soon, Aramark will join their ranks. I'm less than thrilled to see how this shakes out.

A Post-Prison Poem

Thoughts of a Human Time Capsule

I have been away a while,

for many numbered nights and days.

It's okay to ask me questions about.

One thing you lose is modesty,

after half a lifetime doffing

your privates to uniformed strangers.

People seem somehow smaller now, sun-dried. Do they know that it looks like they're desiccating as we speak, canted luminously forward, and belittled by the occasional blue-white shutterless flash? I'll say this: things feel all wrong. Simply making a phone call's tricky. Shops claim to no longer recognize me. The scenery's so bright and busy, almost abject in its vacuity. It's a challenge to focus for long. Then come the silent nights, so still that all you can do is dream up sounds to be concerned about: creeping footsteps, distant key jingles. Closets aren't made for sleeping, yet here I lie, reservedly breathing. Brave new world – verging on unworldly – wireless everything, endlessly witnessing, doomscrolling, streaming, disconnected. I'm freighted with a past but carry as one solitary point of pride a browser history that's pristine. * * * * * Years before I wrote this poem (which itself was years ago), I pleased myself by observing that someone who received a really long prison sentence essentially became a human time capsule, containing all of their earlier life and toting it around inside themselves indefinitely. Imagining myself as such a receptacle for era-specific miscellanea held some appeal. Yes, I could've conjured a more romantic image for the poem – "a man in amber," for instance – but the purposefulness of a container buried in the earth, with a carefully curated collage of today's civilization inside of it, better jibed with my sensibilities. Decades of popular entertainment, from The Shawshank Redemption to Tulsa King, have exploited the human drama of former prisoners' return to the free world. Writing Thoughts of a Human Time Capsule basically amounts to an acknowledgment of my interest in this plot device. For obvious reasons, it could even be said to preoccupy me. Just yesterday I learned that my friend Jim, my crossword-puzzling compatriot from the Old-Man Table was finally paroled. I felt so happy for him. Our fellow tablemate Larry, whom a parole board said would die in prison, was released two years ago. Thinking about the struggles these men now face concerns me even as the fact of their release raises my spirits. Both have close family who care very much about them – a critical component of post-release success – but the world they've entered is decades away from the one they left behind.

Jim and Larry are the time capsules my poem speaks for. So is everyone who survives many years in prison before being jettisoned into your world. The emotional and factual toll of that experience is one that I pity as much as envy.

The Only Book I (Tried to) Read This Fall

Just a few visits to this blog will tell you that I appreciate a good, heavy read. (Maybe this is why a lot of visitors here at pariahblog.com are librarians.) I like my books in the way that Second Amendment nuts like their guns – with stopping power. The material doesn't have to be difficult, but it should engage my intellectual faculties somehow. I believe that a truly worthwhile book enlarges my world, or at least changes my perspective in some way. Even so, every couple of years I'll take up a volume that really tests my literary mettle. This tendency has been called masochistic by some, but I prefer to think of it as ambitious.

On to Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace – the man, the myth, the legend – built his contentious reputation on this doorstop of a book. Was Wallace a bloviating bro or a mad literary genius? The MacArthur Foundation awarded him a grant, so one could argue that the latter applies, but legions of disgruntled, even disgusted readers shouldn't be ignored. Infinite Jest, his dispiriting 1996 novel of the near future, is considered Wallace's magnum opus. Yet, if you type this partial search phrase into Google: "Why is Infinite Jest...," auto-complete will suggest several revealing options. These are reason enough to question the position of Infinite Jest – indeed, of Wallace himself – in the literary canon.

The mid-'90s in American literature seem, in retrospect, to be the autumn years of the straight, white, upper-middle-class, cisgender male enfant terrible. Into this scene dropped Infinite Jest, which immediately won a reputation for being an unlikeable, not to say unreadable book. Implanted by the controversy, a simmering desire to read it grew within me the year of its publication, when critics everywhere leapt from their chairs to spar over its literary merit. I was young and ignorant; I believed that any book with such power to polarize readers had to be worth checking out. When I went to the public library, however, other, more arresting books invariably caught my eye. Fast-forward twenty-five years. Wallace is long dead by his own hand. A forty-four-year-old me finally gets his hands on Infinite Jest and is totally stoked. Imagine, then, the disappointment of this anti-sports fanatic at finding that 60% of the book relates, directly or indirectly, to tennis. It's narrative chronology is a mess, too. I'm cool with nonlinear storytelling, but this book garbled "plot" is something else altogether. I gave it an honest go. For three months I strived mightily to get through just the first quarter of the book. I refused to give up. Greater books had failed to best me. Despite hating every page, I read Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Battling its often-incomprehensible style, I read Alan Moore's Jerusalem. I even read the entirety of James Joyce's Ulysses, for crying out loud! There was no way that Infinite Jest could keep me from finishing it. Except I really couldn't finish it. In truth, I barely made it past page 200, where a narrative about Tiny Ewell's revelations at Ennett House – on concentration, tattoos, addictions, cockroaches, acceptance, angels, et cetera – delivered the killing blow. I was beaten. I know Infinite Jest offers biting criticism of consumer culture, trenchant commentary on the nature of mental disorders, and a conspiracy of Canadian wheelchair assassins, but I just couldn't muster enough give-a-shit to get that far.

I spent three months forcing myself along, only to fall to the side of the road, gasping for breath. Desperate for an antidote to Wallace's mentally imbalanced self-seriousness, I pulled up some pulpy Philip K. Dick stories on my tablet's e-reader and read those – a far more enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.