It used to be that Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisoners worked five days a week and got a sack lunch on the job site. So if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat. We also didn’t get showers on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays or Sundays if we didn’t work those days, but that’s a different thing.
In the ’90s we started getting a hot lunch in the chow hall on weekdays. The prison population was growing rapidly at that time, and the labor force far exceeded the available jobs. Half the population was left in lockdown 8 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday, while the rest went to work. Which meant that when the cell doors were opened for evening chow, out poured a mass of people who hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and rather than continue to deal with that GDC made hot lunches the norm. Everyone in lockdown would be let out for a short lunch break midday, which calmed things down for a bit.
Still, on weekends and holidays you didn’t get lunch unless you worked those days. Or you got the diabetic meal, which was a sack lunch they’d let you go pick up at noon.
“Diabetic meal” became a catch-all term for various “special diets,” which arrived to accommodate different medical needs of the prison population boom. High/low blood pressure diets; high/low cholesterol diets; allergen diets with alternatives to nuts or fish or tomatoes, etc. They were a money-suck. These days the only “special diets” are for food allergies; you get a card to carry around that says you’re allergic to nuts, for example.
Next came the “calorie diets”—meals simply labeled as 2,000, or 2,800, or 3,000. Chow hall trays with two bologna sandwiches, maybe more depending on your assigned calories, with some sort of canned goods on the side, plus milk.
“Additional meals” doesn’t refer to new kinds of meals, or a surplus of meals; it refers to “lunch.”
In 2024 GDC was allocated $1.2 million so that in the next budget cycle prisoners could have “additional meals” on weekends. This doesn’t refer to new kinds of meals, or a surplus of meals; it refers to “lunch.” Lunch being two cellophane-wrapped slices of white bread with a smear of peanut butter. And now that we get lunch seven days a week, lunch on the weekdays is the same peanut-butter sandwich as it is on weekends. Unless you have the nut-allergy card, in which case you can pick up two cellophane-wrapped slices of white bread with bologna.
On weekday mornings we must be up by 5 am, and breakfast is served at 5:30. But on days we’re not required to work—weekends and holidays—we’re allowed to sleep until 6 am. Coincidentally, weekends and holidays are when breakfast is pushed up to 4:30 am. At least one out of every three people will skip breakfast to get the extra sleep. As predicted, our “additional meal,” our “lunch,” must be picked up at breakfast. Now if you sleep until 6 am on your day off, you’ve forfeit both breakfast and lunch.
Because of this, on weekends and holidays less food is prepared for breakfast. Often too little for the number of people who do end up going to breakfast. When the prepared food runs out, anyone toward the back of the line gets a breakfast of whatever can be whipped up the fastest. Extra of whatever’s leftover, instead of whatever ran out.
So since we’ve begun getting our “additional meals,” which we can only get by forgoing our additional sleep, fewer people are getting lunch on weekdays, lunch itself is smaller, and breakfast is two biscuits and no eggs.
We used to be able to offset all this with commissary. But today it’s $6 or $8 just to fill a soup bowl with a Ramen, a little meat, maybe some pickle and crackers. Gone are the days when you could turn $2 worth of store goods into a meal and cup of coffee. Fond memories, like the days of the two-sandwich lunch.
Image (cropped) via Fulton County Sheriff’s Office/YouTube