When we were growing up, we had a cliche about the menu for people behind bars: bread and water. In Wisconsin right now, those who run incarceration facilities are holding the bread and increasing the water. With food prices rising, authorities responsible for the enormous number of people we incarcerate are wondering how much they really have to feed them.

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. says: “As long as the taxpayers have to struggle with rising food costs and eat more Hamburger Helper … why should they have to pay increased costs for people who have disregarded society’s rules?” In showing such contempt for those in his Milwaukee County Jail, Clarke conveniently ignores the fact that most of those prisoners are awaiting trial and haven’t been convicted of anything. The primary reason most jail inmates are being held is they don’t have the money for bail. Why should we worry about feeding poor people? Most of them are probably out of the habit of eating anyway.

Clarke’s remark also suggests that prisoners are getting much finer cuisine than they are. Hamburger Helper would be a marked improvement over most of their fare. According to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC), even with a 12% increase in food costs so far this year, the average cost of a meal for those who are incarcerated is $1.11. You don’t get a whole lot of filet mignon for that.

DOC officials say they’re cutting back on bread and mixing more soy into their mystery meat concoctions. Inmates say their drinks are so watered down that walleyes could be showing up in their milk soon. No one can be surprised that state and local officials are trying to take their budget problems out on the most vulnerable and powerless people in our society. It’s always politically popular to take things away from those who have the least.

But if rising food prices are creating financial problems for our jails and prisons, there are easier ways to reduce costs than cutting off food. Honestly, why pinch pennies by watering down drinks when we could just as easily save tens of millions of dollars a year? A couple of years ago, two Republican legislators requested a study of how much money the state could save by providing drug treatment instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders. The results, documented by Justice Strategies, were startling.

At that time, Wisconsin was incarcerating 2,900 low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, many of them first offenders who would not even be prosecuted in other states. Wisconsin taxpayers were paying a whopping $83 million a year to lock up people who really needed drug or alcohol treatment. Those folks probably would have received it, too, if they had a little more money. For the well-off, alcoholism and drug addiction are considered health problems requiring treatment and rehabilitation.

For the poor, addictions are criminalized, resulting in incarceration. Boy, if we saved $83 million a year, we could buy a whole lot of peanut butter sandwiches for our jails. What the heck, we might even toss in a cookie. And we would have plenty of money left over to provide drug and alcohol treatment for everyone we presently incarcerate for their addictions.

The cost of incarcerating a nonviolent drug offender in need of treatment is about $29,000 a year. High-quality, community-based drug treatment with support services would cost a fraction of that, about $6,000 a year.

Certifiably Ridiculous
Instead of trying to figure out how little we can feed the people we incarcerate, isn’t it time we came right out and admitted that the number of people we lock up in this country has become certifiably ridiculous? According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College, London, the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but now incarcerates about a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Remember when we used to call ourselves the land of the free? During the Cold War, we were the good guys and our archenemies in the world were evil, totalitarian states—the Soviet Union and Red China— that kept their populations in chains.

Well, guess who’s No. 1 in imprisoning its citizens now? Incredibly, China, with four times the population of the United States, is a distant second—not only in the percentage of citizens it incarcerates, but even in the number of citizens behind bars. The United States imprisons 2.3 million people compared to 1.6 million in China.

It would be nice if we decided to stop incarcerating so many of our own citizens because of the damage caused by being the world’s largest prison camp. Failing that, let’s stop just because our grocery bills to feed all those imprisoned people are getting too high.

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