Fried Chicken Day, Part 1

(Originally Posted on September 3, 2015)

They’ve got precious fried chicken for lunch today. Oh, it’s not 100% fried, as half the heating is done in a massive oven, thereby liquefying the crust into a greasy gelatin. But in a southern penitentiary, chicken is the ultimate meal.  And fried chicken? Once every couple of years if we’re very lucky. The result of this deprivation is that fried chicken day becomes a holiday that turns the prison upside down. Pretty much every inmate and bossman on the farm wants a piece of that chicken. Two or three pieces if he’s diabolical enough to obtain them. With a chronic diet of insipid casseroles, meals aren’t usually a big deal. Inmates with money can barely be bothered to eat the slop at all, much less stand in a long line to get it. This is especially true in the summer when a trip to the chowhall is pure misery drenched with sweat. But even the rich prisoners show up for fried chicken, so a lot more food must be prepared aside from the usual surplus stolen by the kitchen workers on any given day. The kitchen captain dictates extra food to cover for theft and the gluttons, but today all of his planning will be impotent despite added precautions and security. The final few hundred people in line (please don’t let me be one of those poor bastards!) will wait for hours, the kitchen scrambling to find and haphazardly cook more food.

Most wardens hate fried chicken day, and some won’t allow it at all because of the chaos it creates. A southern penitentiary is a beehive of activity. It’s a profitable slave industry for one thing: making furniture, auto bodies, retreading tires, detergents, clothing, BBQ grills and a whole lot more. They also cultivate many acres of cotton and produce, raise massive amounts of livestock (Including hundreds of thousands of chickens) along with horses and bloodhounds complete with training. There’s no end to the ways our prison system finds to use its free labor force. Then there are the daily rituals mandated by federal law, like meals, showers, laundry issue, recreation, and even a sort of medical/dental care, which was once done by the inmates themselves until the Feds again interfered and ordered the state to use licensed doctors. (It’s possible that medical care was more humane and of better quality when the inmates administered it.) There are daily religious indoctrination programs and even education for inmates who can afford it. And then there are the eight counts, which take precedent over all activity, but are generally attempted to coincide with other movement when possible, as the counts occupy 12 to 18 hours of each day.

Normally, chow fits seamlessly into the schedule. It’s a rush job: the endless lines stay moving, and you get five minutes or less to eat, depending on the generosity of the floor boss — a tragedy for the men with no teeth, their meal usually unfinished (dentures aren’t in the prison budget). Before you know it chowtime is done, easy as pie. But a special meal like chicken will disrupt the whole system, and the delay will have everyone from factory supervisors to doctors sitting idle, awaiting their inmate charges.

I’m not from the south and chicken isn’t as near and dear to me as it is to the natives, yet I too, will attempt to finagle an extra piece. I enjoy rich flavors as much as anyone, and fried is as rich as it gets in prison. I believe all inmates develop desperate cravings for the palatable tastes they once enjoyed as real people. The average prisoner can drone for hours about the meals he misses and, because flavors are inexorably linked to moments in life, a guy will digress from savoring the cake his mom use to make to the time she laughed so hard she dropped the cake on the floor and they ate it anyway.

I avoid reminiscing about the food I once had the privilege to eat because of the associations involved. For a lifer, good memories are far more painful than bad ones.

Prison fare usually tastes exactly like you’d guess. No citizen wants to hear that inmates are enjoying high quality food because for one, it’s expensive and two, what kind of punishment allows for good meals? Southern prison systems are especially sensitive to such opinions and feed us accordingly. Quality and expense are kept to a minimum. In fact, when I first arrived here 20 years ago, the administration got into deep trouble in their quest to feed us as cheaply as possible. It became known as the Vitapro Scandal: Vitapro was a meat substitute of dubious ingredients that came in large plastic buckets labeled “Not for human consumption”. The stuff was awful, and even the poorest inmates often went hungry rather than eat it. But Vitapro wasn’t a scandal because it was being fed to us; I mean, who cares about prisoners? It was a scandal because prison officials were getting illegal kickbacks from Vitapro, which is a prison tradition that, again, no one really cares about (except somehow a liberal journalist got wind of it and exposed it). So they went back to feeding us human food…technically speaking.

End part 1