Chad Blair/Civil Beat
When Hawaii’s prisoners sit down to Thanksgiving dinner Thursday they will be eating turkey loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy, hot vegetables and pumpkin pie. But their holiday meal will be healthier than prison meals of the past. The food will be low sodium and low fat. That’s because all 4,000 inmates incarcerated in Hawaii have been put on a Heart Healthy diet.
The Public Safety Department started serving so called “Heart Healthy” meals to Hawaii inmates last year. Prisons director Ted Sakai says the new diet was adopted to address soaring medical costs in the prisons. And also, because it is the duty of prison managers to keep inmates in good health.
Sakai says “the main health problem in Hawaii prisons used to be AIDS and hepatitis. AIDS and hepatitis are still problems, but in recent years the chief medical officer is seeing more and more diabetes, hypertension and serious heart disease. One way to address this is to change the prisoners’ diet.”
Adding to prison health woes is the population of elderly inmates locked up for long terms — the aging men and women convicts suffer from the same health problems that afflict elderly people everywhere. And beyond that is the fact that most convicted criminals are unhealthy in the first place.
Public Safety spokeswoman Toni Schwartz says when they check in to prison they are already in bad shape from drug use or homelessness and lifelong diets of cheap, junk food. “Years and years of eating plate lunches,” says Schwartz.
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