The Case for Vegan Prisons

It doesn’t matter whether you like vegans or not. Irrespective of your views on Veganism, here’s why it’s time to turn our prisons vegan.

Prisons as Penal Institutions

One of the primary functions of a prison is to serve as a penal institution — to punish offenders for their illegal and anti-social behavior.

Historically and through today, meats and cheeses are expensive foods. For most people around the world, animal meats and dairy products are considered “nice to have” rather than “must-have” dietary items.

If you accept those two mainstream premises, then prisoners should not be “rewarded” with meat and dairy as they are doing time for a crime. In this view, feeding inmates meat and dairy is an expensive treat that no rational state can justify.

If you want to “punish” your prisoners and change behavior away from violence and disregard for morality, then take away the foods that they have grown up with. This is both a stick, and a very healthy carrot.

Prisons as Rehabilitative Institutions

If your view of prisons is that they should rehabilitate prisoners as an alternative to (or in addition to) punishment, then veganism is also the way to go.

Prisons are violent places.

Prisons are literal embodiments of the state’s apparatus of force. They express state hierarchy via imperfect, but brutally effective, means. Each day, prisoners are faced with the metallic reminder that they are cogs in a complex social machine of distributed, decentralized, and highly regulated violence.

Meat and dairy consumption in prison just affirms the brutality of our increasingly mechanized and ruthless systems of justice. When prisoners are served milk, steak, and eggs, they are reminded that rape, murder, and theft are fine, so long as they are done at large enough scales.

If our goal is to reform prisoners — to rehabilitate and retrain them for re-socialization — the best place to start is on the dinner plate.

When prisoners eat prison-grown plants, it restores a sense of self-sufficiency, good physicality, responsibility (“food grows where water flows”), and an overall positive sense of purpose: providing for oneself and others in material ways. In social terms, such a system promotes a sense of shared purpose, community, and organization.

When prisoners are served milk, steak, and eggs, they are reminded that rape, murder, and theft are fine, so long as they are done at large enough scales.

Most prisoners eventually get released.

Do you want to ride on the subway next to an ex-convict with mud under their fingernails from gardening, or blood under their fingernails from their last burger or prison riot?

Vegan Diet as Restorative Justice

In a way, we’re all natural born killers. We step on ants and swap mosquitoes. We eat cows and chickens, and we roast young piglets and turkeys on those “special” occasions when we want to be really thankful that we’re at the top of the global food pyramid.

But even though we’re born to be natural killers, it’s doesn’t mean we have to stay that way. The whole point of being human is to be a better person today than you were yesterday.

The best people work to be better tomorrow than they were today.

Convicts spend far more of their time reflecting on their mistakes and crimes than anybody who gets away with their crime. Most convicts know the real meaning of justice — defined in all of its complex racial, class-based, and historical terms.

Most convicts genuinely want to be better versions of themselves when they leave prison than when they entered prison.

The goal of prison should be to recognize and facilitate the pull towards self-improvement, rehabilitation, and restorative justice.

In its purely dietary form, veganism is Exhibit A for the potential of the human mind to expand, learn, heal, and to improve.

Taking Stock

So, from the perspective of the prison, shifting global prison populations to exclusively plant-based diet has the effect of: (1) cheaper prison administration (plant-based diets are significantly cheaper than MDE-based diets [MDE = meat/dairy/egg]); (2) better prisoner life expectancy (vegans live longer; and a core prison performance metric is average life expectancy of prison populations); (3) higher likelihood of rehabilitative/restorative outcomes in prison populations (higher levels of socialization); (4) lower medical costs (vegans lead healthier lives); (5) etc.

From the perspective of the prisoner, a shift to a plant-based diet is: (1) healthier lifestyle; (2) in males, a 13% higher base testosterone level; (3) longer life; (4) greater sense of social and biologic welfare; (5) restorative/reparative justice (direct participatory/observational/causal linkage between “food ethics/food violence” and “social ethics/social violence); (6) etc.

There are dozens of counter-arguments, but all of them are weak. Meat eaters may call this “cruel and unusual punishment” or something of that sort. But veganism is so mainstream that this argument falls. Other folks may say that prisoners are regimented far too much as it is, and that, in any event, diet is a personal choice that we should not stick our noses into.

But prison diets are already highly regimented, and prisoners already have limited menu choices. A vegan-only prison would still accommodate religious dietary needs — of course (though it should be noted that no religion explicitly requires practitioners to eat meat). But it would also signal to prisoners that they can and will change their earlier ways — for the better.

Hell, for some people, “vegan prison” would be the best thing that ever happened to them. Bad inputs don’t necessarily mean bad outputs. But bad dietary inputs lead to bad dietary outputs.

It’s time to turn bad to good. For good.

Go Vegan!