Abstract
Women’s perceptions of the prison experience and the punishing dimensions of their confinement are under-examined. To expand knowledge in this area, Sexton’s theory of penal consciousness is used to analyze formerly incarcerated women’s narratives about prison food. This analysis builds understanding about the lived experience of incarceration by explicating one dimension of prisoners’ understandings and perceptions of punishment. Women’s narratives describe both concrete and symbolic punishments associated with food. Participants spoke about poorly designed, sloppy food systems that left them feeling uncared for, ignored, frustrated, and humiliated. Women articulate experiences of hunger that reflect both a deprivation of adequate food and a rationing of humane attentions. These punishing perceptions may inhibit the efforts of social service and health providers to engage incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women in care. In contrast, exceptional participant narratives about positive, non-punishing food experiences suggest that ameliorated food systems could improve the lived experience of incarceration and promote the engagement in services that is needed to improve the outcomes of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women.
Keywords
Introduction
Addiction flares and she is out on the street, hustling for drugs to feed her habit. Rarely stopping, never sleeping, she moves between abandoned houses and strangers’ couches. When she remembers to eat, it’s a small bag of chips from the corner store, a half-eaten snack cake left on the counter. After the police arrest her and process her into lock-up, she sleeps and when she wakes up she is sick: The nausea and sweat of withdrawal hit hard. The smell of a baloney sandwich, slipped unceremoniously through the bars, is intolerable and she quickly passes it on to another woman in the cell. She wraps her fingers around the carton of orange-flavored juice, sipping without appetite. When she stands before the judge on Monday morning, she is filthy, tired, and hungry. The lights and sounds of the courtroom crowd in on her as she follows the public defender’s script. On the van ride to the jail, her head pounds and her stomach swirls, hands and feet shackled. Nodding through the intake process and the medical questions, she finally makes it to the unit where she falls into the bottom bunk exhausted. She hasn’t eaten in nearly 48 hours. The next morning, she is awoken at 5:00 am with a tray of grits and yellow cake. Warm milk. The faces, voices, and smells of the other women in her bunk come in and out of focus. She eats the cake, frosting thick and sweet, steadying herself for the months to come.
The US rate of incarceration is still the highest in the world and prison programs and services have been consistently scaled back since the 1970s (Carson, 2015; Wacquant, 2009). The conclusion that a swollen system of confinement with minimal services is inherently harsh has been contested by theories that highlight the subjectivities of punishment (Foucault, 1975; Sexton, 2015). Research about penal subjectivities focuses in particular on the micro-activities of daily prison life to better understand individuals’ experiences with and perceptions of punishment (Smoyer, 2015). Scholars argue that it is through these quotidian tasks that the carceral experience is lived, making micro-activities better suited than macro-descriptors of correctional systems for understanding individuals’ experiences of punishment during incarceration (Crewe, 2011; Liebling, 2004; Smoyer and Blankenship, 2014).
In her development of a theory of penal consciousness, Sexton (2015) constructs an understanding of punishment that lies at the nexus of severity and salience. Severity “refers to the intensity or magnitude of punishment as it is experienced by the prisoner” (p. 127), and salience speaks to “the prominence of punishment in a prisoner’s life” (p. 128). The association between these two variables is not necessarily a positive, instead the two are linked by the “prisoners’ expectation of punishment” (p. 128). In other words, prison is perceived to be more punitive (salience) when the lived experience of incarceration (severity) is harsher than what one had expected it would be. Sexton labels the dissonance between expectations and experiences as the “punishment gap” (p. 128). This definition of punishment purports that punishment is not a discrete fixed phenomenon but rather one that is co-constructed by an interaction between the experience and the inmate’s expectations of the experience. The degree to which individuals perceive specific penalties as harsh, or not, depends on the extent to which their own lived experience aligns with their expectations.
Understanding women and punishment
Because the great majority of incarcerated people are male, approximately 93% of the US prisoners (Carson, 2015), research about prison has focused largely on men’s lives (Carlen, 2013; Hatton and Fisher, 2009). Scholarship about women’s experiences of incarceration, while small, describes an ordeal that is distinct from their male counterparts (Bloom, 2003; Owen, 1998; Zaitzow and Thomas, 2003). Research about punishment exemplifies this distinction. The punishments experienced by men, famously outlined by Sykes (1958) in his mid-century study of a male correctional facility in New Jersey and repeatedly endorsed, include the loss of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and safety. These deprivations assume a baseline of economic and social privilege prior to incarceration that the marginalized women who are confined in US prisons may have never known. The great majority of incarcerated women in the United States are low-income, unmarried, survivors of trauma who are living with mental illness and chronic health conditions (Bloom, 2003; Greenfeld and Snell, 1999; Springer, 2010). Given women’s circumstances in the community, prior to incarceration, Sykes’ pains of incarceration may be less pronounced for them than among men (Bradley and Davino, 2002).
This is not to suggest that women do not experience incarceration as punishment, but rather that their prison experiences, and the expectations and meanings attributed to these experiences, are gendered. For example, research has identified the loss of family, and children in particular, as a central and acute pain of women’s imprisonment (Covington and Bloom, 2007). Unlike male inmates, most incarcerated women were custodial parents at the time of their arrest, lending a more heighted sense of familial loss to their incarceration experience (Bloom, 2003; Mignon and Ransford, 2012; Snell, 1994). In response, it is not uncommon for incarcerated women to organize themselves into ersatz family units, mothering younger inmates, accepting protection and guidance from elders, and nurturing peers (Watterson, 1996). Other differences may lie in the micro-activities that are the focus of Sexton’s theory of penal consciousness. The meanings and sense of punishment assigned to the deformation of housekeeping and food-related activities, which are traditionally understood as women’s domestic work, may vary by gender and be more pronounced for women who may have been more engaged in these tasks prior to incarceration and, therefore, experience their loss more keenly.
Understanding food and punishment
Within her framework of penal consciousness, Sexton (2015) defines punishment as falling into two categories: concrete and symbolic. The categories are not mutually exclusive: A punishment may be perceived as concrete, symbolic, or both. Concrete punishments refer to material deprivations, “hinging on the presence or absence of concrete, material things,” (p. 120) while symbolic punishments are “losses of autonomy, self, and personhood” that exist along a “continuum of the loss of freedom” (p. 123). In the research with incarcerated people that Sexton conducted to articulate and test this theory, food was a ubiquitous example of concrete punishment (i.e. lack of food, unhealthy food, etc.). Food-related issues were also included in the examples of symbolic punishment, namely the inability to shop, make food choices, and control timing of consumption were experienced as a loss of freedom.
Indeed, the consumption of unappetizing food has long been identified as a punitive feature of prison life (Sykes, 1958). Nascent research about prison food has ventured beyond consumption to understand activities related to acquisition, preparation, and distribution of food in prison in order to describe how incarcerated people use food to resist carceral power and construct identity, relationships, gender, and place (Earle and Phillips, 2012; Godderis, 2006a, 2006b; Milligan et al., 2002; Smith, 2002; Smoyer, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Smoyer and Blankenship, 2014; Ugelvik, 2011). Building on Sexton’s initial foray into an articulation of food-related circumstances as punishment, this analysis uses her theory of penal consciousness to understand the ways in which food contributes to women’s experience of prison as punishment.
Methods
For this project, 30 formerly incarcerated women were individually interviewed about prison food. All of the participants had been imprisoned at the same facility, Women’s Correctional Facility (WCF), 1 in the Northeast region of the US within the last 12 months. Located in a small state with a unified correctional system, WCF is run by the State government and serves as both prison and jail: It is the only correctional institution for women in the state. Participants were recruited, using convenience sampling, from a community-based program that provides post-incarceration housing and services in a small urban area. All of the participants were living in a transitional housing building operated by this program at the time of their interviews. The demographic composition of the sample mirrored that of the correctional facility where the participants had been imprisoned. The sample was racially diverse: 13 Black, 12 White, and 5 Latina. The mean age of participants was 37.8 (SD = 10.5). Nine (9) of the women had been incarcerated at WCF only one time, 12 had been incarcerated two or three times, and 9 had served from 5 to 32 sentences (all at WCF). For 21 women, the controlling offense for their most recent prison sentence was a drug-related charge.
In accordance with the approved IRB protocol, written informed consent was administered and all respondents were compensated $30. The interviews, which lasted approximately 90 minutes, were digitally recorded and transcribed. A semi-structured interview guide, including 14 questions, was used to conduct each interview. These questions inquired about the first food served to them at intake, typical cafeteria fare, commissary orders, favorite food, least favorite food, discipline related to food, cooking in the housing units, food on court runs, and weight fluctuation. Qualitative data analysis software was used to code and organize the data using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Thematic analysis is a prescribed process for recognizing patterns, commonalities, and contradiction within qualitative data sets (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The six phases include “familiarizing yourself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, producing the report” (Braun and Clark, 2006: 87). Using this system of analysis, all study transcripts were read multiple times by the first author, themes were identified, and text related to each theme was coded and organized. Here, data related to several of these themes (i.e. hunger, nonsense, apathy) are presented and described.
Findings
For the most part, women’s narratives about food constructed the prison institution as apathetic and nonsensical. Women spoke about poorly designed, haphazard food systems that left them feeling uncared for, ignored, frustrated, and humiliated. They articulated experiences of hunger that reflected both a deprivation of adequate food and a rationing of humane attentions. There were also exceptional instances in which participants described empathetic and compassionate food experiences. We will explicate the themes that arose from women’s food narratives and explore the implications of these findings on understandings of carceral punishment, proposing suggestions for policy change and future research.
Nasty, rushed, watched, and served: Food as concrete punishment
Women experienced prison food as a harsh and punishing part of prison life. Specifically, a concrete or material sense of punishment (Sexton, 2015) was extracted from both the type of food and the manner in which it was served. Disagreeable aspects of the prison food included the timing of meal service, surveillance of food consumption, the ways in which food was served, and cooking systems. The participants’ construction of the food as a central pain of incarceration is not novel: “From the bad old days of ‘bread and water’ punishment diets to the minimal functional variety of contemporary prison fare, prison food is popularly regarded as part of the punitive armory of the prison experience” (Earle and Phillips, 2012: 144). Still, these detailed accounts of their food experiences, especially the pervasive theme of humiliation, illuminate the participants’ incarcerated lives and build knowledge about the meaning that women ascribe to prison food systems.
Nasty
Participants consistently characterized the food as disgusting. For example, Mary described the “nasty” food served in police lock-up: “[A] big piece of something that was called meatloaf … It sucks. It’s nasty. They don’t put seasoning on it. And they give you black coffee, with no sugar or cream.” Women assigned similar descriptions to the bagged lunches provided during trips to court hearings. Bologna and cheese sandwiches “you wouldn’t eat” and a warm drink (Susan). Laura’s description was similar: “If you’re lucky you get some sort of a juice. Usually, it’s a warm, disgusting carton of milk … The juice is, it’s 100% fake … it makes you more thirsty if you drink it. It’s all sugar and it’s terrible.” Debra conveyed a sense of repulsion when she described the cafeteria food: “Really you don’t want to eat the slop a lot of times because that’s like the worst part. It’s like dog food.”
Rushed
The amount of time allocated to eat cafeteria meals was a highly contested issue. Women alluded to policy that defined meals as 20 minutes long but reported being rushed by correctional officers (COs) to eat in less than half that time: “They’re [COs] like, ‘I don’t see you eatin’. ‘You can’t be eatin’ if you’re talking. Get up, let’s go! ‘You got 5 minutes’ … You get 12 minutes to eat. They say 20, but that counts your walk there and your walk back” (Liz). Complaints about being rushed to eat were common in the cafeteria narratives. Eating in the cafeteria was described as a process of “scarf,” “shovel,” and “inhale” (Sara, Julie, Darlene)—verbs that suggested the human experience of eating was transformed into an unpleasant act which was nonhuman, mechanical, or animal-like, devoid of social interaction. “Everybody just learns to shovel it all in … you’re not allowed to talk while you eat” (Julie). In this environment, women learned to eat as quickly as possible: “You gotta like inhale that food, literally” (Darlene).
Watched
The timing issue was intertwined with another key characteristic of the cafeteria environment: Surveillance. As Julie described it, “You’ve got like your 15 minutes to eat and 50 COs standing over you and telling you to hurry.” While reports of the specific number of COs and other staff in the cafeteria vary (women’s estimates ranged from 5 to 50), there was consensus that “There’s COs everywhere” in this space (Julie). Barb presented CO watchfulness as unnerving and oppressive, “COs in the middle of the aisle, watching you, while you’re eatin’ your food.” Women also experienced the watchfulness of other inmates in this space: “It’s like a lot of eyes, always watching everybody, always gossiping, always, like, “Oh, you see that girl right there?”” (Debra). With all the staff and inmate “eyes” in the cafeteria, the daily ritual of eating meals in this space was transformed into a public performance. This public character of prison eating stands in contrast to daily meal patterns in the community, which are generally played out in the private, domestic sphere.
Served
The ways in which food was distributed and served at the prison also provoked embarrassment and anger among the participants. In the cafeteria, women were allocated meal items by other inmates who worked in the kitchen. “You don’t really get to pick; you’re just given your food. You take a tray, a drink, and you go sit down.” (Becca) The parallel between prison and school cafeterias was not lost on the women: “There’s a line, like in school, they take a spoon and pour it on and you move to the next person that got something. If you want that, they pour it on” (Jessica). The strictly calibrated serving system degraded the inmates by removing their ability to make their own food choices.
Cooking
On one level, cooking on the tier with items bought from commissary or smuggled from the cafeteria, kitchen or workplace was a restorative act. Women could access a relatively normal moment preparing the food themselves, sharing with whomever they chose, and eating at their own pace. However, most cooking, beyond narrow allowances for preparing noodle soups and drinks with hot water, was prohibited so women risked disciplinary action by engaging in this behavior. In other words, part of the prison punishment was that this relatively normal, enjoyable activity was not allowed.
Since most cooking was illicit, the prison provided few cooking tools and women used trash bags to prepare complicated, group dishes: You can throw a lot of soups in the [trash] bag. And you take hot water from the hot water pot, tie it in a knot. And let it sit ‘til it swells up and you eat it. Sounds gross, I know, but that’s just how they cook in bags in jail (Jessica).
Let them eat cake: Food as symbolic punishment
Most of the themes presented above, namely rushed, watched, served, and cooking, suggest experiences of both concrete and symbolic punishment. Perceptions about lack of time, privacy, and normal cooking tools are material absences which also accentuate the participants’ loss of autonomy and freedom. Two additional themes of symbolic punishment that surfaced in women’s prison food narratives were that (1) the correctional system does not care about the people in its custody (apathy), and (2) its policies do not make sense (nonsensical). The punishment derived from these perceptions was an experience of dehumanization by and distance from the State institution and its employees. You are so hungry when you’re first coming in [to prison]. Especially when you are coming off drugs and now you have been running on the streets for months or years and you haven’t been eating … I used to get hungry where I was shaking, I would almost feel like I was going to pass out. But they don’t care. No bread … but they’d give you cake, cake … You get it almost every morning for breakfast, a piece of cake with your oatmeal, a piece of cake with your freno, a piece of cake with your eggs, a piece of cake with everything. But, you can’t have bread. I just can’t understand the logic behind the menu. (Darlene, emphasis added)
Apathy
Like Darlene, 14 of the 30 participants used food narratives to illustrate what they perceived as the apathy of the correctional staff, and the institution more generally, towards the inmates. Alicia reported that food was not provided to women during the initial intake process because the staff did not care if the new inmates were hungry. Cafeteria food was unhealthy and cold because “no one cares” (Ashley). When Michelle attempted to explain her food allergies to prison staff they told her, “That’s not our problem.” People who were moved to the medical unit due to illness were not offered any type of special meal because “they don’t care” (Darlene). It was futile to report the incident when commissary items were stolen because “COs [correctional officers] don’t really care—they like, it’s jail” (Joyce). Becca recounted how some COs would allow women to cook illicitly with trash bags and hot water because they “just didn’t care.” In Gabby’s discussion of the baloney sandwiches served during court runs, she explained that “You can possibly get a sandwich that’s sour. Done been sittin’ too long.” Gabby did not suggest that anyone intended for the sandwiches to be “sour,” rather that no effort was made either way—to keep the sandwiches fresh or rotten—the system was apathetic.
As a counterpoint, some women did recount food incidents that suggested staff did care about the women. These moments where inmates were offered empathy stood out in their minds. For example, Nadine had an untreated chronic pain issue when she was incarcerated. Unable to get a prescription from the prison doctor, she stole sugar while working in the kitchen and traded it with other inmates for Motrin pills. When a CO found sugar and the Motrin pills on Nadine while doing a strip search, she was issued a ticket and sent to the Disciplinary Board. After Nadine explained the situation, telling the Board that she felt she had to trade stolen sugar in order to “self-medicate” her pain, the ticket was dropped. Here she reflected on this leniency: Actually there are people [at the prison] that are human ‘cause … I actually thought, when I first go there, that people are just inhumane. You know, the authority, the COs. Inhumane. All I heard was, “I don’t care. I don’t care.” Then I actually realized they don’t care. You know what I mean? I mean this is not a place where people care … But as I got within the system and seeing how things work, there are people that are human. You know what I mean? He [CO on Disciplinary Board] understood. I mean, I guess in his mind he’s like, “I probably would have done the same thing.” (Nadine)
Similarly, several women recounted incidents in which COs shared their leftovers from meals brought in from outside the prison. Sometimes COs would give women this food directly: “They used to give me some … They’d be just like, here Ashley, you want this? And it’s like, yeah, real food, yeah!” (Ashley). On other occasions, participants reported that COs would purposely leave food behind after eating, allowing the inmates to consume their scraps: “Say I’m eating right here and I’m a CO. I’d put it like right there and just walk away. Like, you know, I didn’t give it to you. That’s what a lot of them did” (Michelle). Women described finding parts of a Subway sandwich or an uneaten pizza crust carefully wrapped and left on the edge of a trash can for someone to find. These examples of food compassion, like the empathy offered to Nadine in her disciplinary hearing, illustrate the discretion available to COs to operationalize their professional responsibilities and enact their own humanity. While eating someone’s leftovers from the trash may not sound very appetizing, in an environment of scarcity, women appreciated this food gesture.
Nonsensical
The second dimension of Darlene’s cake-bread narrative—that the system made no sense—travelled together with the perceptions of apathy. Participants often concluded that the system was apathetic after deliberating the rationale behind specific food policies and finding no reason to explain them. For example, in Darlene’s mind there was no logical reason that explained why bread was removed from the cafeteria menu, “it doesn’t make any sense.” With no explanation in sight, Darlene concluded that “they don’t care.” The nonsensical narrative reinforced a lack of intention that characterized the apathy narrative: No efforts were being made on behalf of the inmates, even to create thoughtful policy, because to put forth such intention would require that administrators and staff cared about the women. Michelle stated that she had “no idea” why commissary rules restricted inmates to five cans of tuna per week. Darlene could not explain the rationale for not allowing women leaving for court appointments to go to breakfast in the cafeteria: “You get a bagged breakfast which I don’t know why they don’t let you go to breakfast [in the cafeteria] because you don’t leave until after breakfast is way over.”
Cafeteria policies often did not make sense to the participants. Ashley was one of many participants who criticized the rules prohibiting inmates from taking food from the cafeteria or getting extra portions, even when there was extra food that was being thrown out: “They don’t want to feed it to the girls. It didn’t make sense to me.” Similarly, Kris thought it was “crazy” that prison food policy prohibited second servings even when there was extra food. Susan puzzled over the fact that COs would throw out the food that women tried to remove from the cafeteria: “Even a perfectly good apple or orange that somebody else could have eaten.” Reflecting on the 12 hour stretch between dinner and breakfast, Becca could find no reason why inmates were not allowed to bring snacks from the cafeteria: “They’re allowed commissary so it’s not a question of bringing ants in or anything like that. I don’t know the reasons for that … why can’t you bring a bag of cereal back?” In all these cafeteria narratives, prison policy was constructed and experienced by the women as nonsensical.
As exemplified in Darlene’s cake/bread narrative, women also challenged the rationale behind menu choices and nutritional planning. Laura questioned why sandwiches could not be made with more nutritious bread: Always white bread. Which doesn’t make any sense to me either because white bread has all that sugar in it and they are going to complain about weight and everything but you don’t want to give us a healthy bread, you’d rather give us white bread which is the worst kind of bread you can give someone …
Discussion
These data contribute to and provoke discussion about formerly incarcerated women’s perceptions of carceral punishment. Participants constructed prison food and related activities as an unsavory and punishing dimension of prison life. The food itself, and the conditions under which inmates obtained, cooked, and consumed the food, humiliated the women by depriving them of the privacy and control afforded to adults in free society. In the limited space where they could cook on their own, the illicit nature of this behavior forced them to prepare and eat the food with toilets and trash bags, circumstances that highlighted their degraded state. Prison food policies were used by participants to construct the correctional institution and its staff as apathetic and nonsensical. The refrain “They just don’t care” was repeated throughout these narratives as women described a prison system and administration that they perceived to be indifferent to inmates’ lived experience. Participants reported that many food policies, including cafeteria rules regarding timing and menu choices, simply made no sense. In short, participants described daily servings of apathy, nonsense, and punishing humiliation that left them feeling hungry and alienated. Food systems, food-related punishment, and the food itself were experienced as unfair, inconsistent, and harsh expressions of state power.
Women’s interpretations of these conditions as punishing and deliberate attempts to degrade and aggravate them illustrate the subjectivities theorized within Sexton’s framework of penal consciousness. While the food policies described in these narratives could have conceivably been constructed with sadistic intent, it is more likely that the menu planning, meal schedules, and rules about cooking in the housing units are dictated by budgets, staff scheduling, and fire safety protocols. Food services at WCF are allocated about $2.30 per day, per inmate. As a point of comparison, the USDA’s “Thrifty meal plan” budgets, on average, $5.34 per day for women 19 and older to cover the minimal costs of nutritious meals (United States Department of Agriculture, 2016). This cost differential suggests the ways in which the local prison food environment is shaped by higher levels of the decision-making. Still, even if policy makers and administrators did not seek to create a punishing system of cell cooking that relied on toilet refrigeration when designing these correctional systems, their intentions are moot. What is relevant here are the women’s perceptions of their punishment and meanings that they assign to prison life, not the accuracy of these perceptions.
Policy and program implications
This analysis of food-related micro-activities in a women’s prison relays women’s understandings of their confinement. What actions does this information invite? One option is to leave these food systems in place. While these daily impositions may not have been originally imagined, the compounded sense of punishment and despair that they provoke can be understood as consistent with the system’s punitive goals. The perpetuation of this status quo is not, however, without risks. Participants’ perceptions of food policy as excessive punishment may undermine the legitimacy of the institution and its agents, provoking non-compliance with prison policy and discouraging incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from engaging in social service and health systems while incarcerated and after their release (Smoyer et al., 2016). Research is needed to measure the impact of prison life, and prison punishment in particular, on engagement and compliance with state-sponsored services. Does state assistance seem less palatable after a consistent diet of disregard and humiliation during incarceration? Efforts to engage formerly incarcerated clients in services and encourage compliance with care may be weakened by client perceptions that the state does not care about them and/or is nonsensical.
Even without a full understanding of the short- and long-term implications of incarcerated food systems, these participants’ narratives make it clear that prison food systems and policies are divisive in terms of institution–inmate relationships and ripe for improvement. While specific food items were described as “nasty,” it was the seemingly arbitrary nature of the food systems that was most infuriating and dehumanizing: that policy was not explained and staff was unresponsive to needs. Ameliorating perceptions of prison food does not require that every inmate demand be satisfied, only that the system be understood as fair (Liebling, 2004; Sparks and Bottoms, 1995; Tyler, 2006; Vanhouche, 2015). Assuming no new funds to substantively improve food choices, change is still possible by altering how food is delivered. Specific food policy changes that correctional institutions and policymakers could make to build confidence in state programs and improve the lived experience of incarceration include:
Create prison food systems that demonstrate concern, empathy, and respect. For example, allow inmates to serve themselves and eat at a reasonable pace. Communicate the rationale behind food policy. Create a prison food council that promotes dialogue between inmates and staff about food and allows incarcerated people to have a voice in the institution’s food policies. Examine the manifestations of food-related humiliations in prison operations. Choose food catering systems that seek to transform prisoners, not degrade them. For example, encouraging inmates to take responsibility for their food choices by providing nutrition information and allowing them to cook for themselves (Minke, 2014). Build understanding of prison punishment that focuses on the deprival of freedom and does not use food to construct additional layers of punishment.
In support of changes like these, research is needed about what food systems incarcerated people would consider preferable, how to increase the acceptability of prison food policies, and, as suggested earlier, to measure the impact of reforms on perceptions of punishment and engagement with services in prison and upon release. In addition, prison food research with men in the US would help to build knowledge about the extent to which women’s experiences are unique to their gender.
Theoretical and methodological implications
In addition to these applied applications, these findings contribute to the development of theoretical frameworks and methodological insights to better understand and interpret correctional systems and incarcerated people. Sexton’ s (2015) theory of penal subjectivities encourages preconceived positivist notions about punishment to be contested. This framework aligns with Smith’s (2002) examination of incarcerated women’s relationships with food which suggested that junk food, while physically unhealthy, may nurture positive psychosocial outcomes for women including agency and visceral gratification. Similarly, Earle and Phillips’s (2012) analysis of incarcerated food systems, and self-cook kitchens in particular, challenged the stereotype of incarcerated men as hyper-masculine predators. The data described here join this call for a non-binary understanding of the correctional experience by suggesting that food policy created without any deliberate punitive intent, may be experienced by women as unbearably harsh and humiliating. These analyses suggest broad interpretation of the prison experience and magnify the importance of including the experiences and perceptions of incarcerated people in correctional research and policy development.
Conclusion
Attempts to ameliorate women’s experience of incarceration have centered on developing gender-responsive institutions. Around the US, and the world, health care services, psychosocial programming, and body search and restraint policies are being modified to recognize the socialization needs and high prevalence of traumatic experiences among incarcerated women (King and Foley, 2014). However, these reforms and programmatic innovation may be undermined by institutional systems, like the food systems described here, that foster a traumatic environment of punishment and degradation: “There is much that can be done to develop more appropriate policies for women across a broader range of areas … corrections professionals need concrete models as a guide in developing gender responsive policy” (King and Foley, 2014: 5). Indeed, the construction of gender-responsive correctional facilities requires a wider gaze that includes food-related behaviors and other quotidian tasks: It is through these micro-activities that people, on the inside and the outside, make meaning of their lives (Counihan, 1999).
Local work to improve prison food systems has begun and should be scaled up in order to realize significant change (Firth et al., 2015; Smoyer and Minke, 2015). Interventions that satiate the concrete and symbolic hunger of incarcerated women offer an opportunity to engage incarcerated women in care. It took only a moment of staff empathy for a study participant (Nadine) to appreciate their shared humanity and provoke the kind of client–provider communication that is needed to promote wellness. The quest to improve criminal justice, health, and social outcomes for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women requires that prison become a place of connection and engagement, rather than punishment and alienation. These narratives draw attention to the importance of prison food in realizing this vision.
Footnotes
Funding and Conflict of Interest Statement
The project described was supported by the City University of New York Graduate Center's Doctoral Student Research Grant program and Award Numbers T32MH020031 and P30MH062294 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The findings, analysis and discussion presented in this article are attributed solely to the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the City University of New York, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, or the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services.
Note
