Surviving on Scraps: Ten Years of Prison Food in Georgia

Author: Stony

I came into the Georgia prison system in 2015. I’m still here. I’m innocent, but that’s another story for another day. What I want to talk about today is the food, because after nearly ten years of eating it, I know what it’s doing to us. And I know most people on the outside have no idea.

Most everybody starts at Jackson. That’s where I started. The first thing you notice at Jackson is the roaches. They were everywhere. On the bottoms of the trays, and because trays are stacked, that meant they were on the tops of trays too. They scattered when you set your tray down on the table. Too often they were in the food itself — sometimes dead, sometimes still alive. Everything was suspect at Jackson. But you’re only there a short time, and if you live through that, things are generally better at your permanent camp.

For the first few years at my permanent camp, the food was edible, somewhat. Not good, but you could get it down. Then COVID hit, and the food situation got so bad that you were forced to beg for money from friends and family just to survive. It didn’t happen in one day. It got worse and worse, gradually, meal by meal. The guys who work in the kitchen told us the budget was cut in half. Today, you can’t survive on what they feed you. The portions are for toddlers. Pigs would turn up their noses at this garbage.

They have fancy names for the meals. If you just read the menu, you might think we were living it up. Take Shepherd’s Pie. Sounds good, right? Our version is ground meat — and I use the word meat loosely — cubed potatoes, and peas that have an inedible shell. Let me tell you about that ground meat. It’s not ground beef. Well, it could be partly, but the beef parts they grind up are bones, hooves, nose, eyes. The real meat is raised by inmates, butchered by inmates, and processed by those same inmates — all of us working for free — and then it’s sold for a profit. We don’t get any of it. What we get is the mystery meat. If you eat it, you will be burping up that nasty taste for hours.

The potatoes are okay. They’re real potatoes. But we get those same cubed potatoes for about 75% of the meals, including many breakfasts.

For about a year now, the hamburger meat has had bone shards in it so sharp you could get seriously injured eating it. Everyone has stab wounds in their gums and between their teeth. People quit eating it, of course. It doesn’t take long to learn to avoid certain foods. There were constant complaints, so you know what they did? They fixed the meat grinder to grind the bones up more. That was the fix. Not stop putting bones in the food — just grind them smaller.

We have no choice. You eat what’s provided or you don’t. We frequently go hungry.

Inmates are surviving for now on the junk food they sell on the commissary. Ramen noodles. Honey buns. Crackers. You are always hungry. Everything they serve and everything they sell is highly processed carbohydrates. Yes, we’re living — but for how much longer? Many of us are getting diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer. We almost never get natural vegetables or fruits. Never protein.

Some guys are super thin. Others are fat. But the fat isn’t from eating too much. It’s from only eating Ramen noodles and other carbohydrates from the commissary. Your body doesn’t know what to do with it.

People are constantly being diagnosed with diabetes. The lines for insulin treatments twice a day are huge. You can stand there and look at those lines and see what the food is doing to us. And the food that’s causing it is still what’s on the tray tomorrow.

Then there are the trays themselves. You should see pictures of our meal trays. Mold is almost always on them. The tray machines never work, so inmates clean the trays by rinsing them and stacking them. There’s no real sanitation. When we get the trays, they’re always wet and moldy. People get sick from it.

But there’s no going to the doctor for these kinds of sickness. To see medical, you have to turn in a sick call. They’re picked up from the dining hall every morning at 7am. So if you turn in a sick call at 1pm, it won’t even get picked up until the next morning. Then — maybe — they’ll schedule you for the day after that. At best, you’ll be sick for three days before you see anyone. And it will cost you $5, which is a lot for someone who doesn’t get paid for working. You still won’t see a doctor. You’ll see a nurse, or at best a PA. So most people just live with being sick.

That’s the thing people on the outside don’t understand. The GDC does not pay inmates for their labor. Nothing. We raise the animals. We butcher them. We process the meat. And the real meat gets sold for profit while we eat the bones. Maybe once a quarter, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a real meal as some kind of reward — a piece of fried chicken, potatoes, maybe a drink. Most of the time, we don’t even get that.

I’m told the food is the same across all the camps in Georgia. I’ve seen pictures. It’s not just here. It’s everywhere in this system.

I’ve been eating this food for nearly ten years. I’ve watched it get worse. I’ve watched the insulin lines get longer. I’ve watched men with cut-up gums trying to chew their way through bone shards because they’re too hungry not to.

I hope people will see the errors in treating human beings worse than animals. Most of the people in here will return to society one day. The way the system currently treats them will be how they treat the world when they get out. We all learn by example. That’s what I want people to understand. You can’t feed a man garbage for ten years, grind him down, leave him sick and hungry and unpaid, and then act surprised by who walks back out through the gate.