Producing food in English and Welsh prisons

Abstract

Most prison food research focuses on aspects of consumption rather than production yet farming, horticulture and gardening have been integral to the prison system in England and Wales for more than 170 years. This paper explores the interplay between penological, therapeutic and food priorities over the last fifty years through an examination of historical prison policies and contemporary case studies associated with the Greener on the Outside for Prisons (GOOP) programme. Findings are discussed in relation to how joined-up policy and practice can impact positively on whole population health and wellbeing within and beyond the prison setting.

Introduction

While food plays a critical role in the physical and mental wellbeing of people in prison, impacting on many aspects of prison life such as culture, relationships and the construction of positive identities, it is often overlooked as a key feature of incarceration (WHO, 2015). Furthermore, within research and narratives of prison food about nutritional or dietary requirements, food habits or the meaning of food (e.g. Smoyer & Lopes, 2017), to-date there has been an emphasis on the consumption rather than production of prison food which this paper seeks to address.

Between 1990 and 2019, the UK prison population almost doubled, it now stands at just over 82,500 (Ministry of Justice, 2019), representing the highest incarceration rate amongst western European jurisdictions (Sturge, 2018). Within the prison populations the most socio-economically disadvantaged communities, where levels of social exclusion are most marked, are significantly over represented (Ismail & de Viggiani, 2018). Research revealing the strong association between offending behaviour and poor health, low levels of educational attainment and wider deprivation suggests a ‘vicious cycle’ with most prisoners coming from and returning to the poorest or most socially excluded sections of society (Bradshaw, Kemp, Baldwin, & Rowe, 2004). Prisons therefore represent a key organisational setting for health promotion activities (Whitelaw et al., 2001), and not least for initiatives that seek to improve nutrition (Gray et al., 2018).

The prison service in England and Wales currently spends approximately £15m annually on prison food, of which the government requires 25% to be grown in the UK. For a budget of approximately £2 per prisoner per day, catering managers are required to source ingredients for three meals that can be described as “wholesome, nutritious, well prepared and served, reasonably varied and sufficient in quantity” (National Offender Management Service (NOMS), 2010). With a focus on gardening and farming, this paper explores how penological, therapeutic and food priorities have shaped prison food production in England and Wales since 1970 using a combination of primary and secondary data including case studies, qualitative interviews and historical accounts.

Prison food production is a complex topic not least because terms (e.g. agriculture, farming, growing, horticulture and gardening) can have multiple, often loosely defined or interchangeable meaning and associated practices. For the sake of brevity and clarity, we have chosen three activities associated with prison food production: gardening, horticulture and farming, and to differentiate between them on the basis of scale, spatiality and scope. Gardening is a relatively small-scale activity (e.g. raised beds) that can be accommodated within the built environment including high security, or limited space prisons. Garden produce typically supplements the diet of the gardeners. Horticulture is a medium-scale, usually commercial activity that can be accommodated within the boundaries of lower-grade prisons subject to sufficient space to erect ‘liminal’ structures (e.g. greenhouses or polytunnels) proximal to the prison. These liminal structures extend the timescale over which seasonal produce (e.g. salad crops) can be grown as they offer a degree of protection (e.g. from bad weather) for plants and those who tend them. Farming typically involves commercial, large-scale crop growing and animal husbandry which enables it to meet the demand for fresh produce from multiple prisons. However, as the history of prison farming shows, commercial imperatives, although important, have neither been the sole nor the principal reason for large-scale, in-house food production (Wright, 2017).