5NEWSOnline reports that Benton County Jail will continue to provide only cold meals to its inmates for a variety of reasons, all of which are absurd and wildly offensive.

Let’s run through them, starting with perhaps the most honest reason of them all:

“I’ts [sic] food,” said Keshia Guyll, with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office. “Would I want to eat it every day? Probably not. But, you know, this is a jail. They are here for a reason.”

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“We wanted people to know that this isn’t just solely a punitive measure, serving inmates cold food,” Guyll said. “There’s other things that go along with that, and like I said, budget is one of the main ones.”

Mistreating prisoners because you think they’re “there for a reason” is not only an opinion ignorant of the various reasons why people end up in prison — just and unjust — it’s also immoral. The courts may have found that cold meals are not constitutional violations of a prisoner’s 8th amendment rights, but some states have outlawed them.

However, in Rhodes v Chapman, the courts found that while prisoners are “not entitled to luxury or ‘comfort,'” facilities must be run in a “manner “compatible with the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” With such disagreement between states, I’d say the jury is still out on this one.

The bottom line is that this view of prisons and prisoners is what allows their abuse to continue unchallenged. Laws and courts are not inherently just, and not everyone in jail has been convicted of a crime. This is a vile case of buck-passing and victim blaming. Continue reading →