Dear Reader,

I often wonder what grocery shopping and weekend plans must be like for you. Do you worry that the weather will ruin outdoor festivities? Do you agonize over the cost of restaurant tabs, especially when you know you have food to cook at home? I know these are simple, seemingly unimportant life questions. Removed from society, many incarcerated people pass their time reminiscing over the mundane things that now seem like very distant memories. 

When interacting with people on the other side of the fence, it’s clear that what’s normalized in prison isn’t normal to the outside world, even when it comes to things such as food. While I know the price of food is a major concern across the U.S. due to inflation, I can promise you that prices outside haven’t yet hit prison-level catastrophic. 

Sometimes it’s hard for people to believe the cost of commissary items in prison. No one knows this better than a man we’ll call Jerry, who is also incarcerated here at the Northpoint Training Center in Kentucky. 

Jerry is more privileged than most. His family maintains communication with him, and they have the means to offer him additional food and funds while he’s behind bars. But even they didn’t believe Jerry when he tried to explain how much it costs to eat better behind bars—and when I say “better,” I mean taste. Definitely not nutrition. 

This really bothered Jerry, and the reasons why were complicated. Let me tell you about the quest that Jerry went on, using bacon to ultimately prove to his parents not only that he was a changed man, but that prisons work to squeeze every cent they can out of the incarcerated and their families. 

Jerry got it into his head that he wanted to invite his parents to Northpoint for a picnic “the prison way,” with commissary food they would eat in the recreation yard.

“I said it didn’t matter to me that we’d smell the cows or that we’d have to swat gnats and flies while we ate,” Jerry explained. “I just wanted them to see what I see and live how I live, even if it was only for an hour or two. Plus, it would be better than sitting in the loud-ass visiting room, having to scream over the family next to us just to be heard.” 

Jerry doesn’t always seem to know it, but he’s very fortunate. There are very few people inside who have friends and family who visit them regularly, and Jerry’s family visits as often as the prison allows.

During every visit, Jerry’s mom commented on him being “too skinny.” Like clockwork, she asked the same question every time: Aren’t they feeding you in there? 

Jerry is a small man, so small that he can use a hair tie as a bracelet—and often does. He has three currently sliding along his wrist. But as someone who struggled with substance dependency, Jerry knows he’s put his mom through a lot, and when she asks about his eating habits, what she’s really asking is if he’s using again.

“They have to feed us; they just don’t have to feed us well, and they don’t have to feed us anything good.”

“Every time I tell her that I’m not using again and that yes, the prison feeds me. They have to feed us; they just don’t have to feed us well, and they don’t have to feed us anything good,” Jerry laughed.

For Jerry’s dad, these conversations eventually grew tiresome, and he asked Jerry if he could put money on his books so that Jerry could have more access to food. It was a somewhat shocking offer. There was a time not very long ago when Jerry’s parents wouldn’t offer him a dime because they knew the money would be used to buy drugs. While it’s clear his relationship with his parents was changing for the better, Jerry knew his parents were still worried he’d revert to old habits. 

So, why a picnic, I wanted to know. What about a picnic would help Jerry’s parents understand him even better?  

“That’s an easy question,” Jerry said. 

But Jerry’s answer was actually quite complicated. 

You see, Jerry had a cousin who did time in the 1990s, back when the state fed people slightly better—or at the very least, didn’t exhort incarcerated people and their families quite as badly for overpriced communication tools, commissary items, and junk food. Jerry’s cousin recently bragged to his family that when he was inside, he was fed chicken, pork chops, and corn on the cob and that $50 was enough to stock up on commissary items for at least a month.

“That might have been true more than 30 years ago, but it’s not true anymore,” Jerry said. “On one visit, I told my mom how much a pack of bacon costs in here, and I explained how the commissary works, and she didn’t believe me. My dad just stared at me. It hurt me to know that my parents thought I was lying, so that’s when I knew I had to break it down for them.” 

Jerry began collecting evidence. It started with commissary receipts and product labels, and then he found people inside who subscribed to the weekly newspaper. He clipped grocery store ads for $3.99 bacon, with the goal of mailing all of the evidence to his parents so they could compare and contrast grocery store prices against prison commissary prices. He was hopeful that by providing irrefutable proof, they would no longer doubt him.  

But even during this evidence-collecting stage, Jerry’s parents’ generosity allowed him to eat better than most of us behind bars. His mom often ordered him meals through iCare Visitation, an Aramark Correctional Services subsidiary that contracts with prisons to deliver extremely overpriced snack packages to people inside. At some facilities, hot food options are also available. At Northpoint, Jerry ate iCare chicken tenders, burgers, and pizza made by the prison kitchen for much higher prices. 

One day, Jerry’s mom ordered him a simple bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich from iCare for $7, and it occurred to Jerry that he could absolutely prove the prison’s inflation of food costs through the bacon alone. 

He found a guy who recently bought bacon from the commissary; he paid $7.20 for a 2.1-ounce package. The guy let Jerry have his receipt and the bacon package label. In order to have a pound of bacon to make his family BLTs for their picnic, Jerry would have to pay the commissary $57.60, compared to the local grocery store that sold a pound for $3.99. There were no fresh ingredients in the commissary, so the BLTs would have no lettuce, and Jerry would have to use tomatoes out of a can for $1.75. When you added a loaf of mushy commissary white bread for $4.31, not only did you have very bad sandwiches, but you had very bad sandwiches you spent almost $64 to make.  

“When I sent my parents the proof, they went ballistic,” Jerry said. 

“That’s one hell of a picnic,” I laughed. 

“Yeah, my mom said she’d much rather wait until I got home.” 

The sad truth for the rest of us is that we don’t have families who come around, let alone families who can provide food for us. A majority of us in prison lived in poverty before we were incarcerated and if we work in prison, we only make about 86 cents for a full day of labor. This means we have to work for eight days just to be able to afford a single package of commissary bacon.  

In prison, we are often told that commissary is a privilege and not a right, and that prices are akin to those at convenience stores. We know these are lies, and we know that access to food is a basic human right. But in prison, we are not seen as deserving of rights, and the exorbitant amounts we’re forced to pay for food, communication tools, and everything else is considered the cost of our confinement—and we’ve learned not to complain.  

Because when we do, we always get the same response: You’re not at Walmart, inmate. What did you expect?

The Right to Write (R2W) project is an editorial initiative where Prism works with incarcerated writers to share their reporting and perspectives across our verticals and coverage areas. Learn more about R2W and how to pitch here.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor