Chin Jou's "Captive Consumers"

Chin Jou is Associate Professor of History at Rice University. She is the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (2017).

Jou applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book falls in a chapter (3) titled, “The Institution Is Our Customer, Not the Prisoner.” This chapter title is derived from a quote that a prison food services company’s director of operations told the New York Times Magazine in 2013. Chapter 3 itself is about how jails and prisons in localities and states across the country have outsourced feeding incarcerated people to private companies in the last three decades or so, and the effects of this privatization. Page 99 is fourteen pages into this chapter, and focuses on what has happened to prison food as a result of this privatization, according to myriad sources.

Page 99 homes in on Aramark, the leading company in “correctional” food services and a name that readers may already be familiar with because of the company’s large footprint on college campuses and in office buildings, hospitals, stadiums, and numerous other arenas across the United States. This page cites news reports, a Kentucky state audit, and academic research on how prison meals changed once Aramark took over provisioning. These changes included smaller portion sizes, adding margarine to meet meals’ calorie requirements, and using less meat in recipes. (Additional changes are detailed in other pages of the book.) Sloppy joes, for instance, would include less ground beef and be diluted with more ketchup and tomato paste. University of Michigan researcher Roland Zullo, who interviewed prison guards in Michigan, found that it was not unusual for Aramark to run out of food before all incarcerated people had been served.

Page 99 provides readers with a glimpse of some of the problems with U.S. jail and prison food in the mass incarceration era (roughly the 1970s to the present), but it is incomplete. It is incomplete because the argument of this book is that prison food is a source of, and exacerbates, hunger, violence, and inequality in American carceral institutions (hence the subtitle of this book). Page 99 gives some, though not all, of the explanations for why prison food leaves incarcerated people hungry, and does not at all explain how it relates to violence and inequality in our jail and prison systems. For more on these topics, readers will just have to pick up the book…

Learn more about Captive Consumers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Supersizing Urban America.

--Marshal Zeringue