When it comes to food, patients in Health Service hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail.
According to Daniel Martin, the author of the article “Prisoners have a better diet than health service hospital patience”, When it comes to food, patients in Health Service hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail, scientists warned. Frail and elderly patients do not get the help they need with meals, and nobody checks whether they get enough to eat, but prisoners are having carbohydrate-rich, low-fat foods which in most cases are better meals than what they would eat outside of prisons. In New Jersey prisons, breakfast usually consists of cereal, toast, jam, jelly, doughnuts, coffee and fruit. For lunch there is most likely spaghetti with meatballs, salad with dressing, bread or rolls, brownies and milk, and the dinner menu may show meat loaf with mushroom gravy, Spanish rice, buttered collard greens, bread and butter, jelly and milk. For the prisoners in Rhode Island, they get to eat turkey and have dessert on all of the main holidays. Instead of giving out desert in prisons, that money could have been used to feed the hungry children in America, or even help the children in Africa who are dying of AIDS.
Free Time
In the article “Drugs, Prostitutes, and Satellite TV” the Prison Officers Association warned that conditions in jail were too good and that many inmates did not want to leave. According to Glyn Travis, who is an assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, prisoners are passing up opportunities to escape because they are more comfortable inside jails where there is a plentiful supply of cheap drugs, according to a prison officers’ union leader.
On the prisoners free time free satellite television is available to more than four thousand prisoners in their cells. They are able to watch their favorite shows, and also movies in return for “good behavior”. One in twenty of them have access to Sky Television from their bed which provides custom production and broadcasting services. How does watching television have anything to do with rehabilitation? The incredible amount of money spent towards these materialistic things could be spent on people who really need rehabilitation like drug addicts and alcoholics.
Prisoners Do Not Want to Leave
Mr. Travis told of one institution in Yorkshire where members of the public were climbing over the prison walls to take drugs inside. “They put up ladders to climb over the walls, but prisoners were so comfortable in the environment they were living in that none tried to climb up the ladders and escape,” he said, in a reference to Everthorpe Prison in East Yorkshire. “When the ladders came down at night, the members of the public hid inside the prison until their colleagues come over the following morning at 6am, put the ladders back up and they were able to get out. None of the prisoners inside tried to escape. “It tells me there’s something wrong in society when people are breaking into prisons to bring in drugs and prostitutes, but the prisoners are quite happy to stay inside.”
