Sickening food: Contracting, competition, and chronic hunger in detention

Keywords: immigration, detention, food, commodification, sickness, dehumanization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 46

Abstract

In 2019, a rare unannounced inspection of immigration detention at the Essex County Correctional Facility, New Jersey, USA, found serious issues with food handling and safety, sanitation, and quality of food. Grievances filed by detainees included comments like “it’s becoming impossible to eat [the food]. It gets worse every day. It literally looks like it came from the garbage dumpster” and “For dinner, we were served meatballs that smell like fecal matter” (Office of Inspector General 2019, 6). Similar accounts are routine throughout U.S. detention. In this paper, we focus on six facilities detaining immigrants in New York and New Jersey to explore how and why food in U.S. immigration detention is sickening. Through analysis of documents obtained through public records requests, detainee accounts, and organizational reports, we make three points: first, food service contracts for detention facilities are coveted and highly competitive; second, bad food in “corrections” facilities is part of the business plan for food service companies, who benefit from flimsy contract boundaries and little oversight to provide poor quality food and maximize profit; third, and consequently, food service is so deficient that detainees frequently suffer both chronic hunger and sickness. We argue that sickening food is both an effect and a metaphor in detention economies. In addition to making detained immigrants physically ill, food services in detention also ‘sicken’ the companies and communities pulled into relationships of economic dependence on detention through the normalization of tiered and degraded standards of care for fellow human beings.