"jail" news and stories

You know you've been tempted. Perhaps you've even offended. However, All You Can Eat Buffet prices are per person, y'all, no cheating.

Seriously. Just ask 40-year-old Dan Linscomb of Texas City, Texas, who was arrested last week for letting his girlfriend share his buffet plate and then refusing to pay.

Linscomb's brazen attempt to save $7 cost taxpayers many times that, as he was escorted from Iron Skillet in Atlanta to the cooler. The big cooler. The cooler with bars. The slammer. The iron bar motel. The joint. The clink. The pen. The pokey. Jail.

Linscomb served two days in the Fulton County Jail and was released after pleading guilty not to "theft of service," but the the lesser charge of "disorderly conduct."

[via San Francisco Chronicle]

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In old movies and cartoons, it was common to see someone use a cake to smuggle a file, which they could use to break themselves out, into an inmate at the local prison. At the cartoon end, the file could be replaced with anything from dynamite to a jackhammer, as the characters didn't have to be particularly subtle to get themselves out of the slammer. Things have to be done more subtle for those who want to smuggle things into prisons in real life, but food can still play a roll. A prison guard at Leflore County jail in Mississippi was arrested after he was caught smuggling in money and marijuana in a large pile of mashed potatoes (That green stuff? Those are just chives...) in at lunch time, when an unidentified woman dropped them off for him. His undoing was a food preference issue, not being careless with the contraband itself. The thing that made investigators suspicious was that the officer said that he didn't eat potatoes and couldn't explain why he was getting such a large portion of them delivered to him at work.

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The New York Department of Corrections is thinking about putting some fast food on Riker's Island. The food won't be for the inmates - though some nutritionists and others who are not fans of fast food would probably feel that it could be considered a punishment - it will be for the guards and other staff members. Currently, the guards get one (free) meal per shift and eat the same food as the inmates do, but there is a demand for more variety in their meals, so the DoC is seeking "an expression of interest" from companies "that would like to operate a fast-food joint in the joint."

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A teenage Taco Bell employee in Virginia has received a sentence of six months in jail for spitting in a loyal customer's Mountain Dew, according to the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star. After the customer raised a stink about the lack of iced tea, Shaleesheya G. Ford, 18, decided to lace his second choice with something of her own. According to the victim, Ford giggled and told him to have a nice day as she handed him his drink. The victim discovered the "loogie" shortly after leaving the restaurant. "Once I touched it, I knew exactly what it was," he told the FFLS. The spit in question was turned over to police. Charges stemming from the incident include assault and battery, obstruction of justice and filing a false police report. It's unclear from the FFLS story how the charges are related to spitting in a drink.

A hot breakfast was the standard prison breakfast for many, many years for the same reasons that oatmeal is a popular breakfast food on the outside: it's healthy, filling and inexpensive. But porridge is off the menus in British prisons, replaced with a "breakfast pack" that costs only 27p per prisoner (about 46¢ US). The reason for the change, according to audit investigators, was "because cooked breakfasts are no longer part of contemporary eating habits in the wider community". Since the prison officials are so on top of food trends, they found it necessary to remove the offending breakfast cereal from their menus.

It is highly that the change was made to save money. While the breakfast pack - which includes 1 cup of breakfast cereal, two slices of bread, jam or marmalade, margarine, tea bags, instant coffee and a small milk cartoon - might cost slightly more per serving than oatmeal, it is given to the prisoners the night before and prepared and eaten by them in the morning. This eliminates the need to have the kitchen staff on hand for one meal every day.

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