Does anyone seriously believe that last August’s riot by inmates at the Northpoint Training Center near Burgin would have been prevented had state employees been preparing meals at the prison instead of Aramark, a private company that holds a $12-million-a-year contract to provide food service state prisons?
To do so is to trivialize the much more serious security problems at Northpoint that led to the uprising and to use the incident to propose a law that would require the state to provide food services to state prisons.
Without doing anything to improve the operation of state prisons, House Bill 33, sponsored by Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greeneville, would increase the number of state employees and add at least $5 million to the cost of operating the state’s prisons — all at a time when the General Assembly is being forced to reduce spending by at least $1 billion over the next two years.
To be sure, some prisoners and guards and a Department of Corrections report have listed food quality as an underlying cause of the Northpoint riot, but the state maintains a controlled movement policy at the facility prompted the outbreak. We have little doubt that inmates complained about the food at the prison, but such complaints are common wherever individuals are given little or no choice about what they are fed for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
If the Department of Corrections was dissatisfied with the quality of food prepared by Aramark, it should have demanded that the company improve its menus. However, we suspect it would have taken much more than tastier food to prevent the riot.
Back in the days when state legislators and then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher were at odds over the opening of the new Little Sandy Correctional Complex in Elliott County, one of the cost-saving moves that ended the stalemate and allowed the prison to open is to agree to privatize food service. That made it unnecessary for the state to hire dozens of new employees to prepare and serve meals at the prison, which saved money, but the change also made labor representatives of state employees unhappy.
From our vantage point, all Yonts’ bill will do is increase the cost of operating the state’s prisons at a time when the soaring cost of housing inmates already is straining state resources. It was approved Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee but should be rejected by the full House. This certainly is no time to needlessly be adding to the cost of operating state government.
