Prison meal program cuts costs, not calories

Monday, November 3, 2003

By JOSEPH A. GAMBARDELLO
Philadelphia Inquirer

It's a penny-pincher's dream come true - three meals a day for $3.08 per person.

The secret is bulk buying.

The ambience, however, is minus-four stars. You'd have to be an inmate in a New Jersey state prison to get this meal plan.

While some states are cutting imates' portions and calories to save money, New Jersey is watching its costs fall while still giving inmates a minimum of 2,900 calories a day.

Texas, for example, has reduced calories for its 148,000 prisoners from 2,800 a day to 2,500 to save $6 million a year.

Pennsylvania's meals cost even less than New Jersey's - $2.49 per person - while providing 2,800 to 2,900 calories a day.

Robin Miller, supervisor of the New Jersey Department of Corrections' Field Services Unit, said the daily cost of feeding an inmate had dropped from $3.17 three years ago. Those pennies add up to $755,000 a year systemwide.

According to the Connecticut-based Criminal Justice Institute, the national average daily cost to feed an inmate was $3.62 in 2000, the latest year for which numbers are available.

One key to New Jersey's cost-cutting is that its 14 correctional facilities rely on one kitchen, in a corner of the 250,000-square-foot industrial building at the South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, Cumberland County, where inmates also make shoes, road signs, and license-plate decals.

Operating around the clock with 130 inmates, the high-tech kitchen churns out 30 different dishes for the 23,000 state prisoners - about 2.5 million portions a month.

But we're not talking cuisine here. The operative word is institutional.

There is not a frying pan or a stove in sight; the cooking is done with giant vats and ovens.

On a recent day, sweet-and-sour chicken stewed in 200-gallon vats, and bagged beef roasts simmered in water cookers that can handle 1,000 pounds of meat.

Ingredients are premeasured, and everything - from temperature to time - is programmed. The food is bagged hot and chilled for shipment around the state.

All the prisons have to do is heat and serve.

"We feed the state," said Paul Simpkins, supervisor of the six-year-old operation. "And we've saved a lot of money."

Everything has a 45-day shelf life, but the food is always consumed within days, Simpkins said.

Based on orders from the institutions, favorite foods include chicken barbecue, cheesesteaks, and breakfast sausage in gravy, assistant supervisors Richard McCauley and Adam Truett said.

"We're constantly working on product development," Simpkins said.

Separate meat- and produce-processing facilities at South Woods and a meat-processing facility at Riverfront State Prison in Camden supply the kitchen. Vegetables and fruits come from the farm at Bayside State Prison, also in Cumberland County, and farms around the state under different cost-saving arrangements.

"We use every product we possibly can," Simpkins said.

"Our per diem cost is consistently dropping every year by several cents a day," Miller said. "It's a steady decline in an economy where food prices are going up. I attribute it to our ability to buy in bulk."

By bulk, she meant everything from barrels to totes, "but not quite up to a train-car dole."

The department recently received 10 tractor-trailer loads - or 350,000 pounds - of diced chicken for free from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miller said.

The centralized operation was not quite welcomed throughout the prison system when it started, Simpkins said, but most of the kinks have been worked out. "It just flows now," he said.

Still, he said, cost-cutting remains the number-one goal.

"We are working to tighten things up even more," Simpkins said.

Inmates, in the meantime, may not love the food - a fact acknowledged by everyone - but those working at the kitchen said they could foresee using on the outside the skills they were learning.

"It keeps me busy," Andre English said of his 18 months in the kitchen.

The only problem, he said, was the smells.

"I don't eat meat, but the aromas do wear on me at times," he said.

(This article has been reprinted courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer.)