Thanksgiving and Christmas are the times of the year when incarcerated men can count on a decent meal at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, some former Angola residents say.
But nearly two decades ago, the warden himself ordered changes to the menus after some favorite holiday dishes – most notably, the cornbread dressing – left hundreds of men sick, qualifying them for Angola prison’s standard $75 food-poisoning payout.
Thanksgiving had long been a day to look forward to. The kitchen typically rolled out plates of turkey, cornbread dressing, sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls, pecan pie, and more.
Not everyone sees those annual feasts as benevolence. “Holiday meals, it’s an illusion of the prison system caring for the people in their custody for one day,” said Leah Wang, a senior research assistant at the Prison Policy Initiative, which analyzes mass incarceration and its effects.
Others disagree. The holiday food at Angola was something to look forward to, remembered Ian Cazenave, 59, a native of Uptown New Orleans who spent 25 years there. But then came the mid-2000s, the first time that the cornbread dressing was left out too long in Angola’s main prison kitchen, despite USDA warnings about how staphylococcus and salmonella bacteria can grow at room temperature.
Even today, at Thanksgiving time, guys who spent time at the prison are likely to talk about that legendary dressing — and the misery it caused.
For abdominal distress, Angola gives two pills, men can file complaints
Cazenave enjoyed eating that Thanksgiving meal nearly 20 years ago, he said. But soon afterward, he felt abdominal discomfort, as did many others, incarcerated men and staff people.
So many got sick at once that people were forced to break the prison’s unwritten restroom privacy rule – don’t use the toilet next to another man. Guys were lined up on every available piece of porcelain. “A lot of dudes had symptoms of nausea and loose bowels,” Casenave recalled. “Other dudes was throwing up.”
Similar scenarios play out every day in prisons across the nation, said Wang, noting that most incidents derive from poor food handling, outdated ingredients, and inadequate supervision in prison kitchens. “Food-service operations are not being updated properly, they’re not being cleaned properly, and they’re not being monitored properly,” Wang said. “And that ends up rearing its ugly head in the quality of the food being served.”
The cornbread dressing triggered emergencies more than once. It was around 2006 when Cazenave got into a long line where prison Emergency Medical Technicians dispensed Pepto Bismol and a small brown anti-diarrhea pill. But it initially took the EMTs about an hour to respond, said Cazenave, who believes that the response should have been more swift because of the scope of the illness he saw.
The prison’s food-poisoning procedure was always the same: dispense the two pills, then receive complaints from sick men, filed through the prison’s formal grievance process, the Administrative Remedy Procedure (ARP).
The ARP complaints are then reviewed by the prison’s legal programs department. Though some pursued further action, most accepted the usual settlement: $75 quietly deposited into the account of each man who had filed an ARP about food poisoning.
Independent monitors in prisons help maintain food safety, expert says
It is difficult to prepare massive prison meals with limited resources, acknowledged Michael Mosley, 50 a native of New Orleans’ West Bank, who worked 15 of his 22 years at Angola in the prison kitchen, where he rose to head cook.
“Sometimes the food might have an odor and you have to let them know that you’re not going to serve it, or you’re not going to cook it,” Mosley said. Also, the amount of food that has to be prepared simultaneously makes proper cooking difficult. “The majority of the time, you have at least 25 cases of chicken,” he said. “And some of it may go bad.”
Within the kitchen’s protocols at the time, there was no real process for checking ingredients for spoilage or contamination, Mosley explained. “That was not really done.”
Still, despite these not-ideal conditions, Mosley said, holiday meals were treated as special and prepared with extra care wherever possible. “We go out to the kitchen the night before the holiday and bake the turkey and get the turkey together and stuff like that,” he explained.
But accidents happen. The most notable incidents came about 20 years ago, he said. During Thanksgiving 2006 and a few other times, cooks did not maintain proper heat on the prison’s popular cornbread dressing, which contained chopped chicken livers and gizzards. “It soured and the majority of the population suffered from food poisoning,” Mosley said.
In early 2007, after another miserable holiday season, Warden Burl Cain banned cornbread dressing from holiday menus, replacing it with dirty rice and corn. That seemed to work, Mosley said. “The food poisoning went down. People stopped complaining about being sick.”
While working in the kitchen, Mosley sometimes saw that the food was being mishandled, but felt powerless to change it, because prison staff didn’t agree with him, he said. So he’d simply leave the kitchen. “I’m not going to serve nothing to nobody,” he’d say at those times. Even when he left, other men in the kitchen were instructed to serve in his absence, he said.
The Prison Policy Institute urges that all prisons institute independent monitoring for kitchen food-service operations, said Wang, who sees the issue as “incredibly important” for avoiding future problems with food safety. A spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections said the DOC does have such a monitoring system in place, to monitor for food safety and prepare and serve meals in a manner that meets established governmental health and safety codes, a role that is outlined in Departmental Regulation IS-C-1 Food Services.
Now that he’s been released, Cazenave can once again enjoy holiday feasts. “I feel like I know this food here is being better prepared, in an environment where I know that it’s clean and being prepared well,” he said.
These days, Angola’s kitchen also prepares its Thanksgiving meal under closer oversight, with a standard menu and updated food-preparation and consumption measures designed to prevent outbreaks like those of the mid-2000s, said Mosely, whose assertions were confirmed by the DOC’s spokeswoman.
Holiday meals at the penitentiary still come once a year — turkey, gravy, and a few familiar sides. But for many who remember, nothing has ever equally replaced that good ole cornbread dressing, which once the highlight of Angola’s holidays – and later became its most suspect dish.
