>There was no concern for his vegan diet
I can't be the only one that thinks it's ridiculous for a prison to accommodate voluntary diets like this.
I can't be the only one that thinks it's ridiculous for a prison to accommodate voluntary diets like this.
The cost of 'specialty' food for a few tiny percent of prisoners is a minuscule figure in the total cost of imprisonment, and could easily be accommodated within the wider food offerings. If every meal had Kosher / Halal / Vegan offerings as a subset of the total meal, we could both imprison people and treat their ethics and morals with respect. Seems like a win-win.
I understand Kosher for commercial enterprises like airlines: with a minimum of effort, they can satisfy many customers. But governments should have consistent treatment of citizens.
Religious diets are not voluntary, but choice of religion is voluntary.
Vegetarian/vegan diets adhering to an ethical philosophy are not voluntary, but choosing to accept an animal rights philosophy is voluntary.
Either both are a choice or neither are a choice, depending on how you define your terms.
Now, if the vegan diet was for personal taste or even for health reasons (as long as there was no significant health impact from going off of it), then it's a different story.
Care to elaborate on this? Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but I cannot see how a religious diet is not voluntary. Surely someone on a religious diet could eat certain foods if they choose to or not, no?
Agreed
> Vegetarian/vegan diets adhering to an ethical philosophy are not voluntary, but choosing to accept an animal rights philosophy is voluntary.
Not agreed. Your right to accept certain philosophies while in prion is forfeited upon conviction. This means, if you are not eating meat because you simply feel it's wrong -- well, the prison has no obligation to oblige you. If you are not eating meat because of your religion, that is different. Sure - one may "convert" to a new religion to obtain a certain preferred diet, but that is still applying the rule evenly and fairly.
> Now, if the vegan diet was for personal taste or even for health reasons (as long as there was no significant health impact from going off of it), then it's a different story.
This would be the foundation for an awful law which would be enforced with bias and randomness. How do you actually determine if a diet is being followed for pure taste reasoning, or if it's something based on personal ethics? You cannot, and therefore this cannot be a rule. Rules and laws must be based on a foundation that can be applied evenly and fairly to all, not left up to judgement by a sometimes-in-a-nice-mood-sometimes-in-a-bad-mood warden.
>How do you actually determine if a diet is being followed for pure taste reasoning, or if it's something based on personal ethics?
One can also lie about religious affiliation, or magically "convert", to get better or alternative meals, and in fact some prisoners do this. I don't see your point.
Religious belief and ethical belief both reside in someone's mind and nowhere else.
There are a bunch of international covenants and agreements that disagree with you.
This document talks specifically about food: http://www.prisonersabroad.org.uk/uploads/documents/prisoner...
Your misrepresentations of the reasons some people are vegan or vegetarian are so severe it makes the conversation pointless. Some people have beliefs about eatig meat that are equivalent to religious belief.
> 2.3.9 European Prison Rules
> See para (1.2.4) above for an explanation of the European Prison Rules. Rule 22 states “Prisoners shall be provided with a nutritious diet that takes into account their ... religion, culture ..."
> 2.4 Vegetarian and Vegan diets
> In some countries, the food provided to all prisoners may be vegetarian (non-vegetarians may have to buy meat).
So the inverse is true with prisons that serve meat.
> Receiving vegetarian or vegan meals in prison may not be an easy process. In some countries, you may be required to show that your request for a vegetarian or vegan diet is based on ethical or religious beliefs.
Again, the EU portion of this document does not protect ethical beliefs, only religious ones.
There are plenty of people workig on makig prisons nicer for prisoners. This includes respecting their religion (as guided by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Wardens are not robots and are capable of applying common sense and judgment. If a prisoner claims that his morals require him not to eat animal products, he's likely to be telling the truth. If he claims his morals require Kobe beef daily, he's probably lying.
Also, because people who request kosher, halal, vegetarian, or vegan diets in prison aren't generally demanding higher-quality food, just different food. When accommodated, they generally still get low-grade prison fare. Thus there's little motivation to lie about it.
I understand that law interpreters are not mindless robots. However it seems very arbitrary to support kosher and halal, but not Pastafarian diets.
It's as silly as only granting conscientious objector status to "real" Mennonites.
The thing is, you're not going to do that, and neither is anyone else. Policy should not be guided by ridiculous hypotheticals.
Yes, what a shame in such an otherwise elegant and consistent system.
Agreed, this would seem to be manageable without much burden on the system.
On the other hand however, this reasoning discounts scenarios where inmates are pushing these subjective demarcations, for furthering their own needs, at the expense of being fair to everyone.
For example, in many states prisoner's may earn exemptions based off their religious practices.[1] If, an atheist prisoner, was denied sex, just because of their beliefs, I suspect they would have a right to be upset.
One should keep in mind, that it's quite possible to be supportive of increasing prisoner's rights and benefits, whilst also pushing for prisoner equality.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
Well, it all depends on whether you think a prison is meant primarily for rehabilitation or punishment.
a greedy corporate fat cat that cheated people? punishment. Drug or copyright infringement related crimes? rehab.
The question about diets for prisoners that accommodate the needs of the prisoner is generally a 20th century concept[1]. And generally case after case has sided with the prisoners[2].
[1] I've yet to find a case prior to the treatment of prisoners of war in WW 1 that discussed diet but I haven't looked particularly hard so I offer this opinion with confidence but not certainty :-)
[2] Recent example -- https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/may/19/florida-pri...
(I'm almost positive it was sarcastic)
All prisons should be about rehabilitation. Anything else is simply a multiplier to an already existent drain on society.
Prisons should not be about punishing people. Punishment would lead to just more drain on society. I would have hoped we'd have outgrown this childish yearn for revenge in the 21st century.
All the talk about justice being served is missing the point: if punishment is meant to deter crime (either by subduing/rehabilitating the prisoner or by serving as an example to would-be criminals), the feelings of the victim or the victim's family are irrelevant.
But we can actually measure whether punishments are a useful deterrent. Harsher punishments aren't better deterrents. In fact, they may even have the opposite effect: if you're already committing a crime that incurs the practical maximum (i.e. life-long imprisonment or the death penalty), the potential punishment for further crimes can not provide any deterrent at all. What can you practically add beyond that? Torture? Mutilation? A slow and painful death?
I'm not going to argue that the complete absence of punishment would be better. But in order to serve as a useful deterrent punishments often would have to be comically disproportionate to the actual harm of the crime. And that's exactly what we have in the US.
There are exactly three possible explanations to why the US is beating the entire Western world in terms of prison population: a) every other country in the Western world is overrun by criminals because we don't lock up enough of them, b) Americans on average are much more likely to be criminals or c) American prison terms are absurdly disproportionate. I know the right-wing media (or by non-American standards: the far right-wing media) likes to promote a) and Hollywood might be sold on b), I think we both know the answer is c).
Parent post argues that forcing inmates to eat food they consider immoral contributes to their "fuck the Man" mentality, and contributes to the recidivist mentality.
By spinning that into an argument about prison food being so good as to attract reoffenders, you are being childish and dishonest.
Prison is punishment first, rehabilitation second (and it's pretty bad at that considering the percentage of recidivists).
Of all the consequences of breaking the law, being forced to eat something you don't like certainly sounds pretty mild.
Do you not understand that perhaps other people might feel differently? And are you unable to empathise with that point of view?
It's one of the many prices you pay for breaking the law, but surely losing your freedom and seeing the world move on without you should dominate this unease?
A vegetarian diet can be part of a relgious practce. Plenty of Indian religions emphasize a vegetarian diet - Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism. As well as well as the Seventh-day Adventist, a Christian religion.
FYI - i personally am a vegetarian (for over a decade) for ethical reasons and being forced to eat meat would be extremely horrific for me. And i don't think that i would be able to eat fish at all without vomiting. Feel free to make fun of me or whatever.
That's why I asked for a test procedure. Someone can claim that they genuinely believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and therefore must wear a colander on their head, and without a test, how do you distinguish that from a clothing restriction from a major world religion? You either need some internal test on the mindset of the individual (e.g. a polygraph, if those worked), or an external test on the claimed religion (e.g. a minimum number of global followers).
Because you don't like the quality, or because it goes against your ethics?
Do you not see the distinction?
I'm not the parent commenter, but I think those two phrases imply only a difference in scale.
"I need to eat filet mignon once a week"
"No"
"But it's immoral for me not to"
"Oh okay then"
Prisoners are granted privileges based on how society and its laws perceive their demands. Nothing gets automatically granted just because of morality or religious choices by the prisoner.
The fact that our punishment-heavy system doesn't help recidivism should be a sign that purely punishment isn't effective at rehabilitation.
That's certainly how it is now, yes. You think that's how it should be?
Most prisons suck are incompetent and ineffective and need reforming. Accommodating vegans is one of the many things that needs to be reformed.
I don't think you understand how ingrained some of these "voluntary" diets are; how strong taboo is.
EDIT: also, forcing people to eat a certain diet is disproportionately punishng them. Do we give those prisoners reductions in their sentence just because they were life-long vegans before they went to prison?
My point still stands regardless of the extreme example you decided to illustrate it: you disregarded society's values and in return the society will disregard some of your values.
The prisoner doesn't get to decide what is cruel and unusual punishment to them.
The point is that a society that forces a diet on a prisoner , which that prisoner finds immoral, is wrong.
That is not a society I want to live in. Prison should protect the remaining population and rehabilitate, punishment should be a consequence of the means necessary to do so. Prioritizing in that order (protect -> rehabilitate). In my opinion anyways..
Rehabilitation should obviously be another goal, but for violent crimes I don't think there's a good way to predict recidivism that couldn't be gamed. If someone could theoretically be rehabilitated in a year for mass murder, should they be released? I don't think so, because that would drastically reduce the deterrence against murder.
And by removjg diets you are disproportionately punishing some people. A Muslim given the same sentence as someone with no religion will suffer more as a result of imprisonment purely because of the lack of dietary choice.
"Prison should suck" is a horrible sentiment, and runs contrary to the UDHR. I understand that American hasn't ratified that, but that's not because they disagree with it.
To that end, I've been there. You think I'd come out and go "gosh golly, that was sure an effective means of handling my situation?"
Says who? Punishment (beyond the punishing nature of the denial of one's freedom) need only be a part of prison because some peoples' (defective) morality demands it.
The first priority of a prison is to protect the people at large from the expected behavior of convicted criminals.
>Of all the consequences of breaking the law, being forced to eat something you don't like certainly sounds pretty mild.
What reason do you have to believe that forcing vegan prisoners to eat a non-vegan diet (or starve) will have any rehabilitative effect? Or are you happy to mete out punishments arbitrarily based upon individuals' personalities?
Prisons already accommodate a multitude of diets for various (mandatory) reasons. It really isn't expensive to accommodate one more.
Most of the inmates in our prison system are treated "with humanity."
Prison is a lot better than county detention; in prison, there is a loose respect structure between COs and inmates (you live there, they don't). In county, inmates are dehumanized beyond nothing as a form of control and a mechanism to encourage plea bargains. It happened to me when I spent four months in county: "just accept this plea deal and you can go home," and when I refused I got "lost" in the system on the way back to jail. For 48 hours or more (I lost track). With no food or bathroom facilities. Twice.
All pretrial detention comes with a deadline, for the most part (beyond which you must be sentenced or released), and another tactic they use is to get you to "waive" that time so they can "better investigate your case," they say. One dumb individual I spent time with accepted this offer and had spent nine years in county jail without a sentence. I'm not making this up.
I became a much more cynical person during that experience and hate when I see people defending that system in any way. Whatever you think you know about our detention system, you don't. Whatever you think you know about minimum, you don't, too, and I have several scars to show you if you don't believe me.
You are not incorrect, and most of my "knowledge" came from one person, who was incarcerated for ripping off a casino--not via my own experience.
He did 17 years in a really lax place. Pool tables and ping pong and TV and community rooms, stuff like that.
A bit of a knee-jerk response on my part.
This is not true whatsoever. Fundamentally, if the system that feeds prisons treated people with humanity, a large number of people would never be prisoners in the first place.
As someone with food allergies, I could understand (and be unhappy) if a captor decided to feed me allergens as intentional punishment, but I'd be pretty upset and feel pretty dehumanized if a captor just did so because it was the cheapest way to prepare a meal.
Its a very popular strightdope urban legend discussion topic. You'd die pretty quickly if you couldn't adsorb complete proteins. Astrologically speaking, iron ions from spinach are dramatically different than iron ions from a steak, but your biochemistry won't know the difference.
You can get three interesting effects:
1) Any time you mess with your diet you mess with your gut flora and ... residue. Not to mention the "feel" in your stomach before its all broken down to constituent molecules indistinguishable from plant sources (other than less fiber) So minor tummy ache is theoretically possible. Less fiber intake = less... output the next day, etc.
2) From my M-i-Ls adventures in gallbladder problems, its theoretically possible for vegan types to chug olive oil especially in the form of salad dressing, but to really consume huge quantities of oil/fat all at once you need a greasy triple cheeseburger with bacon. So you can have some bile / gallbladder related fun (whoa I just ate three days worth of oils/greases in one meal, totally freaking out my gallbladder type of reaction). You'll be fine.
3) Psychologically you can get really messed up. Try eating some dog sometime in a foreign country and then focusing on your stomach (assuming you're standard American) is going to be all messed up. Still meat is meat and if they told you it was pork you wouldn't have blinked, but here you are feeling like you're gonna hurl. Its really not as much fun as my description sounds. Think of that soy stuff instead of cows/chicken/fish/pigs/dogs and you'll be just fine as long as you can avoid getting all anxious. Being anxious is never fun, no matter if due to diet or relationships or tiny enclosed spaces or public speaking or whatever.
Check page 2 of this Consumer Reports article[1] for an example.
> Enterococcus was the most common bacterium we found, occurring in 79.8 percent of our samples. Next was E. coli, in 65.2 percent of them; campylobacter, 43 percent; klebsiella pneumoniae, 13.6 percent; salmonella, 10.8 percent, and staphylococcus aureus, 9.2 percent.
It's part of the reason that only some people experience the problems as a lot of it depends on how long you have not eaten meat, at what age you stopped eating meat, the overall strength of you immune system and just if you were unlucky the first time you resumed eating meat and ate something with higher percentage of pathogens present. Also, if you regularly cooked and ate from a kitchen that was mixed use or non meat.
[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/the-high...
In general, this is not true. In particular, we can read the straight dope ( http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/696/why-was-spinach... ):
> Spinach's star dimmed once more research was done. It turned out the iron in it couldn't be readily absorbed by the body.
And if you're putting whole hotdog pieces in your stomach you might want to consider chewing a little more carefully, that way leads to choking.
Anecdotal evidence is stupid and pointless (includng my anecdotal evidence) and it's weird to see it so often on HN.
We have multiple anecdotes indicating people have had problems; we have at least one indicating people don't. This is, to me, clearly evidence against both "Everyone has problems" and "Nobody has problems" and in favor of "Some people have problems", and for the specific policy question at hand, we're trying to evaluate "Some people have problems".
I'm not sure how long that would take and if it would happen with all people but just like it takes a while before newborns can digest food properly I suspect that a similar adaptation would not happen overnight in adults that radically change their diet from one set of foods to another.
Apropos: vegetable matter is far harder to digest in general than meat (due to plants having cell walls that need to be broken down first).
Whether there's any particular guarantee of this happening is another question entirely and completely irrelevant. It would be relevant if you could determine that there is a guarantee this won't happen, but that's it.
[Note: i personally am in full support of prisoners being allowed to keep their diet while being incarcerated. Especially as someone who has a special diet myself. ]
It took about a month of slowly introducing meat before I was back to normal. There are others that made the switch cold turkey without problems though.
I suppose you could intentionally sabotage someone by putting bacon in with the beans, so just avoid mixing expensive bacon in with the cheap beans and I think everyone will be happy?
My guess is dietary sabotage is intentional, even if it takes more money and more effort, as a kind of psychological torture. "The guards will beat you if you don't put bacon bits on your salad because they know you're a vegan" type of thing.
(edited to explain, I ate years of institutional food in school lunches, then the Army, and then at University, pretty much my first quarter century of life, and I assumed its "about the same" in prison. Which is very interestingly, apparently, completely wrong. Prison is apparently more like every inmate gets "the" TV dinner today and there's no sharing/trading allowed.)
In almost all cases in county, the food is already prepared in a plastic container and if you refuse what is offered to you, you do not eat, which means even kosher folks go without for a couple days until the records "catch up."
That's what I did when I spent a week in jail (as a vegetarian). I ate fine, but had I been strictly vegan it may have been a different story.
I'm willing to bet there have been a number of hunger strikes over a lack of kosher of halal foods. It wouldn't surprise me if there have been a few prisoners who have refused to eat animal products behind bars, even when the vegetarian products were not nutritionally sufficient.
I would be highly surprised if there were any sustained hunger strikes over lack of gourmet food.
However, I do not see why, as a general principle, prisoners should not be allowed to buy food and have it shipped to them, using their own money.
Vegan; vegetarian; Halal; Kosher; medical; none of the above.
These rules cover most religions and most lifestyle diets; these do exclude wishy-washy bullshit.
Not providing foods guided by a person's religion is probably a violation of article 5 and is a violation of article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights.
You can ask that the prisonor provides evidence of adherance to the restricted diet in their lofe before they became a prisoner. For example, a prisoner who claims to be vegetarian could show that they had been a member of the vegetarian society in their life outside prison.
What about people who only want to eat free-range eggs (and not any products derived from eggs from caged hens?); or do not want to eat fish from non-sustainable fishing? Sure, they can stick to the vegan diet, but isn't it discriminatory that their specific preferences are not taken into account, and that they are mixed with a larger group? (In the same way that, I guess, you would not find it acceptable if people who want to eat halal or kosher were directed to eat vegan food; although note that kosher can be more restrictive than vegan due to requirements on checking for possible insect infestation of certain vegetables.)
What about people who refuse to eat GM food? People who refuse to eat food that wasn't produced locally, because they want to cut down on pollution? What about fruitarians? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism) Jain vegetarians? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism ; note that it excludes onions so vegan diet is not OK). Sarbloh bibek for Sikhs? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_in_Sikhism#Sarbloh_Bibek)
Who is to make a decision about which practices are "bullshit" and which ones are "serious"? or whether one was "sufficiently" committed to a practice in the past? If you specifically accommodate some of these practices but not others, you are discriminating against people following practices which are too rare or not sufficiently established. In this spirit I think your original list would be discriminatory relative to the other practices I have listed above.
My claim is that a prison has to manage the practical life of the inmates and feed them (with a default option; I do not object them buying different food items from external suppliers), and when you have to do this you cannot satisfy all preferences. Then, it is discriminatory to satisfy some preferences and disregard others because they are more common, or they have an established name ("vegetarianism" vs "not eating pineapples shipped by air freight"), or they are motivated by religious reasons. As long as the diet cannot be justified by a medical necessity, you are accommodating a personal preference, no matter the underlying reason; and it is discriminatory to favor some at the expense of others, and impossible to rate whether preferences are "valid" or "serious" (except by a doctor, for the medical cases).
It is probably a good idea to offer diverse food options to increase the odds that people find something that suits them, but as soon as you go out of your way to satisfy a specific observance, I think it has the potential to be discriminatory.
> Not providing foods guided by a person's religion is probably a violation of article 5 and is a violation of article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights.
If you interpret the "right to observance" as implying that the State, when detaining you, must accommodate your beliefs, then as I have argued it is practically impossible to do this in a non-discriminatory fashion.
(To give more background about my opinions: I am quite influenced by French laïcité https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%C3%AFcit%C3%A9 whose current interpretation is often that, to avoid discriminating against any religious creed, as you cannot recognize them all, you should endorse none.)
Or, since it doesn't seem have been suggested previously, why not a Kosher, Halal vegan meal plan for all inmates? If it was nutritionally complete, it should be cheaper than even the presumably cheap meat-based diet most prisoners are currently fed...
I used to tell people our app tracked inventory that was trying to escape.
You have to ask yourself whether you want prisons to punish people or to get them to not commit crimes in the future, if your goal is to punish people, then sure, feed them the opposite of their preferred diet.
If your goal is to change their behaviour then the breaking of bread can be instrumental in creating change. By showing respect for their culture you can begin to bridge the gap and help them respect yours.
>The Prison Yoga Project was founded in the belief that yoga, taught specifically as a mindfulness practice, is very effective in releasing deeply held, unresolved trauma, allowing us to address the resultant behavioral issues
>Our objective is to provide prisoners with a mindfulness tool to draw on their yoga practice when they’re not doing yoga. If they’re tangled in a confrontation on the yard, or upon release, or tempted to go back to using, they can draw on what they have learned from yoga for practical solutions. They can do it without actually having to do a yoga pose to get the value. That’s the transformational, rehabilitative value of yoga.
Video - http://youtu.be/cmiAtV5zAmw