Eating Prison Food

An excerpt from my jail memoir, Hard Time, which Banged-Up Abroad Raving Arizona was based on.

An inmate worker handed me a large brown plastic tray. The slop – red death – looked like carroty vomit blended with blood. Meat and gristle in assorted shapes, shades and  sizes were protruding from it. Gagging on the smell, I placed the tray on the nearest table, and sat down. Because I was one of the first to get served, the prisoners hadn’t mobbed the tables yet, so I’d forgotten about the racial segregation.
Seconds later, a cannonball of a Mexican tapped me on the shoulder. “You can’t sit here!” He had a shaved head, deep-set eyes and long eyelashes.
Dozens of men focussed on us. I maintained eye contact.
The Mexican put his hands on his hips. Raising his voice, he said, “This table paisas’ table!”
Mexicans surrounded me. None smiling. Where are all of these Mexicans coming from? I thought. I’ve got to get out of here, but not in a cowardly way. “No problem,” I said in a deep voice, trying to sound tough. Standing up, I looked around.
My cellmate, Troll, flew down the stairs. “England, you can’t sit there!” Turning to the Mexican who’d tapped me on the shoulder, he said, “Hey, Carlo, this is England, your new neighbour. England say hello to Carlo, the head of the Mexicans.”
The atmosphere turned friendly as fast as it had soured. I bumped fists with Carlo, greeting him with the limited Spanish I knew. He seemed to appreciate my effort.
“Come over here!” a white prisoner yelled.
The whites were laughing at what I saw as a potentially life-threatening situation. Had I blown it out of proportion? I thought of Rob the skinhead’s words in Tower 2: You’ve gotta lot to learn, dawg. It was standing room only at the whites’ table.
“Give him some room on the corner,” said Outlaw, the head of the whites prisoners.
The whites were shovelling down slop, chatting, gnawing on the mystery meat. Some of them eyeballed my tray.
With my stomach cramping as if it were trying to digest its own walls, I was in a hurry to eat. I dunked my plastic Spork into the red death, fished out a chunk of potato, and scraped most of the slop off. I raised my Spork – salivating in the way Englishmen are conditioned to do at the prospect of a good spud – and was just about to devour it when I spotted the lesions. Large. Brown. Deeply engrained. My Spork stopped short of my lower lip. Devastated, I returned the potato to the slop. Eating the two slices of bread that didn’t have any mould on them dried my mouth up.

by Shaun Attwood author of Hard Time and Party Time

Links to some of most popular entries over the years:

Cockroaches

Rapist on the Yard by Warrior

T-Bone

How to Survive Jail

How to Survive Prison

Glory Hole