Goodbye hot cereal, hello corn flakes

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Assemblyman James Settelmeyer doesn’t eat breakfast during the workweek — no time for it. And when he goes out for lunch, sometimes he orders cereal. Sometimes, he says, cereal sounds pretty good.

So why prisoners wouldn’t be grateful to get a bowl of corn flakes in the morning is beyond the Northern Nevada Republican. He plans to introduce a bill to eliminate hot breakfasts in Nevada correctional facilities — a move he thinks could save the state $1 million a year.

But Settelmeyer doesn’t really know how much money would be saved.

He says came up with his estimate after talking to Washoe County Sheriff Mike Haley, who cut three hot meals to two in his county detention facility years ago, and reportedly saved a bunch of money doing it. Settelmeyer doesn’t know how much exactly, and representatives of the sheriff’s office said it happened so long ago that they don’t know either.

Haley, by the way, gives inmates a hot breakfast — oatmeal or cream of wheat. It’s lunch that he serves cold.

The Nevada Corrections Department spends about $2.17 to feed about 13,000 inmates every day, spokesman Greg Smith said. That’s roughly $10.3 million a year. The rotating breakfast options are pretty basic: oatmeal, scrambled eggs, toast, grits and yes, sometimes cereal. Smith knows of no plans to investigate changing the menu. Evaluating the proposal, Smith said, would take up employee hours. (And this is a prison system that has had its budget cut by $26.5 million and is leaving 20 percent of its staff positions vacant to save money.)

Smith, by the way, had a banana for breakfast Tuesday. “I’m more of a lunch guy,” he said.

Settelmeyer, like many fans of harsher prison settings, points to the work of Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who likes to brag he feeds inmates for 30 cents a day, even though the truth is something more like $2 and some change. Arpaio has managed to cut back food costs, Settelmeyer said, and “make prison just a little bit less enjoyable.”

Of course, federal judges have ruled Arpaio’s treatment of inmates was bad enough to be unconstitutional. One of the allegations against Arpaio was that he proudly served inmates rotten food and moldy bread.

Settelmeyer’s plan to cut hot breakfast is actually tame compared with Arpaio’s newest plan: Make inmates pay for meals with money from their personal accounts — whatever was in their wallets when they came in, plus anything family members send in. Those who can’t pay will rack up a tab, according to The Arizona Republic. The Maricopa sheriff says the new policy will start next month, and will save taxpayers more than $900,000 a year.

Yes, more fuzzy math: Arpaio makes thousands of inmates pay for their meals and saves less than a million dollars. Settelmeyer takes away oatmeal and thinks he could save more than a million, actually.

“I’m a conservative person,” Settelmeyer said, “so I lowballed the number. I think the savings to taxpayers would exceed that.”

There is some evidence, however, to confirm savings are possible. In 2004 Los Angeles County stopped serving hot breakfast to the more than 20,000 inmates housed in county jails and trimmed $1.5 million from an annual food budget of just less than $23 million, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The costs associated with switching from hot meals to cold aren’t necessarily because of the food, but because of the labor. Oatmeal is cheap, but cooking oatmeal for 20,000 people isn’t. Especially when the alternative is a premeasured box of cereal, which is exactly what Los Angeles inmates get, prison employees explained: one box of cereal, eggs, milk, juice and a muffin or two slices of toast. Bon appetit.

When L.A. County saves just one penny per inmate per day, it adds up to $75,000 in savings a year, jail food service unit manager Benson Li said.

“We watch fractions of pennies,” he said.

In fact, dinner is the only hot meal for Los Angeles inmates. There’s a secondary savings to serving cold food, Li said. It’s safer, which means it’s cheaper. Inmates come down to a dining hall for warm food. Cold breakfast and lunch is just slipped into cells through little slots. (They put an additive in all their juice, Li said, to stop fermentation; otherwise inmates would turn the juice into homemade booze.)

When questioned, Settelmeyer said he would wait to see what his political colleagues think about cutting hot breakfast before he moves on to other meals.

He said the feedback has been supportive so far. The assemblyman says most people put it like this: “Makes sense to me. I don’t even get to eat breakfast.”