From Inquest:
In July 2020, Dennis Williams — a 52-year old Black man born and raised in Maryland’s Eastern Shore — was transferred from Patuxent Institution, a treatment-oriented prison infamous for its human rights abuses, to the Wicomico County Detention Center, a jail located close to his hometown. Mr. Williams arrived there with a slew of severe mental and physical chronic health conditions — including osteoarthrosis, ulcerative colitis, hypertension, asthma, anxiety, and depression. Having previously been incarcerated in most of Maryland’s correctional facilities, Mr. Williams was accustomed to the extreme inadequacy of medical care provided by county jails and the state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. During his five months in Patuxent, however, his ability to walk had steadily worsened due to his osteoarthrosis; by the time he was transferred, he was in need of a wheelchair and a double hip replacement.
I first spoke with Mr. Williams in May as part of a study our organization, the Maryland Food & Prison Abolition Project, had conducted to understand how prison food conditions changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our previous research with currently and formerly incarcerated folks uncovered the various roles food plays in Maryland’s correctional institutions — namely, as an everyday mechanism of control, dehumanization, and punishment; as a site of exploitation and profit for private food service corporations; and as a form premature death due to long-term impacts on individuals’ physical and mental health. Given that prisons quickly became ground zero for the spread of COVID-19 — and the disastrous responses to the pandemic by state corrections departments — we wanted to understand, in a time of crisis, the impact of carceral food systems on the already life-shortening nature of incarceration.
Prison food conditions in Maryland have been rapidly deteriorating since the state’s jail and prison populations exploded since the 1970s. Adapting to the thousands of people entering state bondage and the industrialization of our food system as a whole, correctional food systems generally cut costs, privatized food service to multibillion dollar corporations such as Aramark or Trinity, and substituted any semblance of real foods with ultra-processed, nutritionally bankrupt meals. In 2018, Maryland spent on average $3.83 per day to feed an incarcerated person for all three meals — averaging to $1.28 per meal. In some institutions, that figure was as low as 72 cents per meal. Continue reading >>>
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