FOOD FIGHT - A MEAL TO DIE FOR - Government - http://maxpages.com/darkevilworld/Food

On September 9, 1999 Inmate Marcrest Crawford, #109937 at the Cummins Unit was lying in his bed in Barracks 6A when another inmate, armed with two homemade ice picks suddenly began stabbing him in the head, neck and upper torso. Fortunately, the welding rod and rebar materials from which the weapons were made, and the inefficient way they were sharpened caused them to bend when Crawford was repeatedly struck, and the serious injuries were not fatal.

The incident was precipitated over fried chicken. One of the men had wanted an extra piece at lunch and the other would not give it to him, so they briefly had words. The stabbing then followed.

I know that many people will take something like this as evidence of the kind of depravity of which criminals are capable, but the tragedy is that so few people give a thought to what an awesome amount of abuse, anger, and rage must fester in a human soul to reach the point where it manifests itself this way.

I want to take this occasion to begin to draw attention to the fact that incidents of this kind are not uncommon at Cummins, even though most of the fights over food do not involve the use of deadly weapons. For a host of reasons Cummins Unit prisoners are the poorest fed of all ADC prisoners anywhere in the state. The food is so typically disgusting that whenever a decent meal IS fed - like the fried chicken - it is necessary for the entire unit to be put on "lock down" status for the duration of the meal, and the security staff is doubled and sometimes tripled during those meals to assure that hundreds of prisoners don't "run the lines" twice or more trying to get full.

I want to make it clear that I am not personally making a complaint about the food, because I realize that a good many people feel that we should be fed nothing but slop, or bread and water in the first place. I personally could care less what the state feeds me. The way I see it, there is "good" food, and there is "adequate" food and I've had maybe four or five good meals in the past 18 years, and all of them on the eve of a prisoner being electrocuted to death or put out of his misery by lethal injection. Otherwise, the food is "adequate" in the sense that it will keep a human being alive, and assuming it is not infected with some disease or other threat to health. A good part of the world's population does not even get enough food to stay alive.

No, what is so unconscionable about the garbage they feed us here is that the PUBLIC is made to believe that the ADC is spending millions of dollars a year on food for prisoners and that the state is feeding us like kings. There is no question that that amount of money is being ALLOTTED for food, but it is not being consumed by the prisoners. THAT is what needs to be brought to the public's awareness. If society wants to feed us slop every day, I personally don't have a problem with it. But if the public is told that it costs $5 million to feed the guards and $4 million to feed the prisoners - but the guards end up eating $8 million of the TOTAL allotment of $9 million - then that is a beef steak of a different color.

Here at Cummins there are also hog lots, chicken and turkey coops, catfish hatcheries and the like. These animals require tens of thousands of dollars a year in feed themselves, and it is simply a fact that much of the food that is to be allotted to the prisoners is deliberately cooked poorly, deliberately made tasteless, and is generally nasty, simply so that we will NOT eat it for the most part - so that the state has a large volume of slop to feed to the pigs, cattle, chickens, turkeys and fish all over the farm every day, or to dump endless gallons of slop into the Arkansas River at the local fishing holes to assure private fishing returns.

That's ok, too, except that when the food that the prisoners are SUPPOSED to be eating actually goes to feed livestock and wildlife - it means that the MONEY that is being allotted for THOSE areas of the farm is being bled off somewhere else.

Wake up, people. The best way to steal the taxpayers blind is to take the base product from a place and in a way that the public is insensitive to - like prisoners' meals - and then to "filter" it out to otherwise legitimate expenditures. After all, if 90% of each meal fed to the prisoners gets thrown away because it smells putrid or tastes like crap and is then fed to the animals, WHERE is the money going from which the animals are supposed to be fed?

I acknowledge that it is almost a tradition that prisoners complain about the slop they are fed - and several major prison riots have been sparked because of what inmates are expected to eat - but it's not really the food per se that pushes them to the breaking point, but the knowledge that the taxpayers are being robbed blind and lied to all the time. At Cummins, the incidents of violence related to food generally is inmate-to-inmate, although several Kitchen staff officers have been beaten severely and there have been several "work strike" incidents in the hoe squads. It is inevitable that one day the spark of violence will take a different form and will ignite something far bigger and more violent.

For longer than I can remember, an emolument program was always in place within the ADC by which the officers and administrators get free food of every description, and some serious and dirty politics involving it are a matter of public record here in Arkansas. There's no sense recounting the several investigations of theft and unlawful diversion of food to private interests that was intended for prisoners. But the scale and sophistication of the schemes to divert food and to swell the bellies and pockets of so many ADC employees until they are so fat they can barely walk, would be the envy of the Indian Reservation Commissioners who used to find better uses for the cattle they "procured" for their own use instead of feeding them to the Indians for whom they were provided.

Anyway, I will give a full and detailed account of those things at a more appropriate time. For now it is simply a sad state of affairs that Cummins prisoners get fed a decent meal so rarely that the prison has to be locked down to feed it, or that a human life has to be sacrificed for it to occur; whether it is by way of an official state execution or by a stabbing in 6 Barracks. Be watching for an article on "Cummins Cuisine".

Tell the Governor of Arkansas what you think