Nutraloaf
Prison Food That Inmates Hate!
By Daniel Muniz

It is no secret that inmates hate prison. And the prisoners who have the biggest issue with being locked up oftentimes take out their aggression on the prison staff.

Violence is nothing new to corrections officers but one intolerable form of misconduct by inmates is when they use their feces and urine as a weapon.

There are plenty of other ways to assault staff but human waste is probably the messiest way to attack.

As a result, many state prisons across the country mete out a novel form of punishment (correctional institutions prefer to use the term “behavior modification”) against this and other types of menacing assaults. They substitute the prisoner’s meals with something called nutraloaf.

Although there are many different variations of nutraloaf that prisons serve, it basically consists of fruits and vegetables (raw, dried, or dehydrated), wheat bread, powdered milk and non-dairy cheese, tomato paste, and vegetable oil.

All of these ingredients are then blended together. And the beauty of this dish is that absolutely no utensils are needed because it is wrapped in paper which also eliminates the need of serving it on a tray. Inmates can make weapons out of anything and utensils are one common source of material that is easily available in prison.

The purpose of nutraloaf is that it is bland and nasty with no real taste to it. Nutraloaf still satisfies the goal of providing nourishment and most recipes contain about 1000 calories per serving so it is indeed a meal.

However, inmates think it is so awful that they would rather not eat anything. In fact, many prisoners do forgo eating.

Nevertheless, everybody eventually has to eat something. So after a while, there are only a few choices available which are to eat it, continue to go hungry, or return to the normal prison diet.

But going back to regular prison food has a catch to it. An inmate has to immediately stop the misconduct that first got him on nutraloaf. Of course, so many hardened criminals have severe attitude problems so they would rather stay hungry instead of complying with the rules and that suits prisons just fine. However, such defiance can only last for so long until an inmate relents and start behaving in an acceptable manner.

And when that finally happens, the prison has accomplished its objective.

The convict is now easier and much safer to handle. And he is also relieved to be eating regular food again.

Of course hug-a-thug activists are outraged!

The problem with these activists is that they think that putting handcuffs on a vicious hoodlum is nothing more than torture. As a result, just about anything that a correctional institution does to an inmate is inhumane.

But more to the point, activists feel that there ought to be very tight and rigid controls in regards to punishing inmates. And that is why correctional institutions claim that nutraloaf is merely “behavior modification” instead of punishment so that they can circumvent that issue altogether. Admittedly, the semantics is important because activists seek to micromanage our prisons to the greatest extent possible.

In this case, it should take the form of a formal disciplinary procedure which involves plenty of bureaucratic red tape and a waste of prison resources. Instead, prisons ought to be free to mete out any kind of punishment they deem necessary as a way to keep the prison population in line. After all, this is prison and the mere fact that someone is serving time in there means that they are already getting punished for something.

Unfortunately, activists have been very successful in tying the hands of prison officials. That is why punishment is a carefully regulated procedure even when an inmate does something outrageous such as using his own excrement to fling at correctional officers.

There is no denying that a formal disciplinary process is needed when an inmate is being charged with a serious crime which results in extending his stay at the facility that he is in. But any infraction short of that, correctional institutions need to have the flexibility to “modify” anybody’s attitude problem so that they can maintain order.

And serving awful food is an excellent vehicle to accomplish that goal.

Inmates don’t like nutraloaf and they hate eating it. However, when they decide to change their behavior, they can resume eating regular prison food.

That is the way that prison ought to be.

Yes, it sounds harsh. And if an inmate doesn’t like it, then he should not come back. However, if the option of not returning is unavailable because the prisoner is serving a 20 year to life sentence, then maybe he should of thought of how unpleasant jail was going to be before he committed the crime that got him incarcerated.

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