Turkey Day in the Clink

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Who assembles this slop? And where is the kitchen, anyway? When I ask Mack and Outlaw, they shake their heads. They know what I know now and what you’re about to: The villain of this story is LeCount Catering Center. LeCount’s cost-per-inmate meal in Raleigh is $1.28. Prisoners in Raleigh don’t hate the sheriff or the cops or the shaved-head, mace-toting, black-clad guards so much as they hate LeCount.

You stop pooping three or four days after you’re incarcerated. This is alarming until you realize that you simply aren’t getting enough nutrition to create much in the way of waste. The jail’s operations manual states that there “shall not be more than 14 hours between the evening meal and breakfast,” and there usually isn’t, but it feels like eternity. One night, Nate’s snoring woke me up and I glanced over at his bunk. He wasn’t snoring; his stomach was growling.

If the low-cal diet provided by LeCount was all there were to eat in jail, riots might rule the day. But assuming you have money, and you damn sure better, you can order Cheetos and popcorn and humongous garlicky kosher dill pickles from the commissary. You can order Honey Buns and MoonPies and tuna salad and peanut butter and jelly. You can order candy bars, from Twix (least favorite, according to a poll I conducted) to Snickers, which outsells all other brands combined.

What I haven’t mentioned is ramen.

Inmates spend upwards of half their weekly food budget on ramen noodles, on account of their low cost, tastiness, and high caloric value. Cajun chicken is the most popular flavor, followed by plain old chicken, beef, and chili. Last year in Houston, inmates consumed 3 million packages of ramen noodles. Without ramen, life in jail would grind to a halt.

It did in Raleigh, two days before Thanksgiving, when a memo from the sheriff appeared on the wall: EFFECTIVE 11/28/07: THE FOLLOWING ITEMS WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE ON THE COMMISSARY MENU: RAMEN NOODLES.

There was no explanation for this outrage. Rumors began spreading like Malibu wildfire: The ramen ban was an act of sadism disguised as a water-conservation measure (North Carolina was in the midst of a record-setting drought); the ramen ban was an outburst of racist paranoia aimed at black Muslims, stemming from a lamebrain muddling of the words ramen and Ramadan.

Finally, one night, a guard appeared to clarify the grim situation. The ramen ban, he said, was the result of too many sinks getting clogged by noodle flotsam, a by-product of noodle preparation, wherein hundreds of prisoners mix ramen with hot(ish) water from the jail sinks.

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