My childhood was replete with family meals and cookouts. Even after I moved out and was, at times, homeless, I always knew that I could turn to my mother for a warm meal. I reveled in the foods I loved and had no problem turning up my nose at food I disliked. (Consider the horror that is egg salad or cooked greens!) Until I was 22, I got to decide what I ate.

That liberty no longer exists for me. Come January, I will have been incarcerated for fourteen years. The meals served in the mess hall of New York state’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility are disgusting: often soy-based proteins accompanied by undercooked rice, pasta, potatoes, or bread. The food is packaged by individuals at other facilities, shipped to Bedford Hills, then boiled or reconstituted with water. It’s possible to purchase basic ingredients like sugar at the commissary, but to access a wider variety of produce and meats, I have to receive them from outside — at costs far exceeding the approximately eight dollars a month I earn through my prison work as a teacher’s assistant for a pre-GED class. As a result, for most of my time at Bedford Hills, I have relied on financial assistance from family, friends, and outside organizations.

The rules surrounding what we can receive have always been stringent. All food (with the exception of fresh produce) must be sealed in commercial packaging. Glass containers and cans are prohibited. Meats must be precooked. Hot peppers, marshmallows, dried fruit, and many other ingredients are banned. Still, my deliveries have provided me with a modicum of comfort.

Over the course of my incarceration, package regulations have slowly become more arbitrary and restrictive. After foil seals, for instance, were banned in 2023 — and along with them, the kind of oatmeal I used to buy — I had to find quick oats sold in pouches. New York has also reversed policies that previously allowed family and friends to send food items by mail or drop them off during a visit. Now, packages must come directly from approved outside vendors. Orders from these vendors often arrive incomplete, and it is hard to obtain replacements or refunds without the cooperation of correction officers, which varies widely depending on the officer and their mood on a given day. What’s more, the authorized companies take advantage of the fact that we have no other options, crying inflation while increasing prices well above rising costs. As of September, limes cost 25 cents each at Walmart, and five times as much from one approved vendor, Emma’s Premium Services. A package of sliced muenster cheese costs $3.01 more at Emma’s than at Walmart. Commissary ingredients are subject to the same markups. According to New York Focus, staple food and snack prices at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York increased between 39 and 333 percent between December 2021 and November 2022.

And that was before the chaos of 2025. In December 2024, officers at Marcy Correctional Facility, near Syracuse, brutally beat a man named Robert Brooks, who died the next day from the injuries. Footage of the encounter, which Attorney General Letitia James released to the public, went viral. After an outcry — rare when it comes to violence against incarcerated people — Governor Kathy Hochul and the prisons commissioner called for the termination of the guards involved. A little over a month later, correction officers across the state went on strike without their union’s authorization, leaving facilities dangerously understaffed. Hochul declared a state of emergency and sent in the New York National Guard. Prisons across the state went into lockdown: all regular programming was suspended, and many incarcerated people were confined to their cells for 20 to 24 hours a day. In March, an agreement ended the strike, but over two thousand correction officers refused to return to work, and were subsequently fired. Although the lockdown is over, National Guard troops have continued to supplement the prison workforce, and conditions have remained reprehensible. Rehabilitative programs are intermittently shuttered, and movement within the facility is regularly limited — particularly when the National Guard must leave the facility for outside training. Meanwhile, correction officers frequently instigate conflict and violence, take extra days off, or simply refuse to do their jobs.

All of this has made accessing food dramatically more difficult. During the strike itself, food deliveries came to a grinding halt. Even now, with the lockdown lifted, the dining hall is often closed, which results in our being served cold to-go trays or bagged meals. At Bedford Hills, three deployed members of the National Guard told me that they are prohibited from handling incoming packages. Mailrooms remain hopelessly backed up and overcrowded. Perishables frequently wait so long to be distributed that they end up in varying states of decomposition. Over the last several months, I have lost the contents of food orders more often than I have received them. By the time packages were delivered to me, grapes had liquified; asparagus had turned into a moldy paste; and grass-fed beef sirloin had rotted, turning an iridescent green after officers removed dry ice from the packaging. Even nonperishable items have been contaminated by spoiled foods in the same boxes.

Even though this food is inedible, correctional staff still think it’s appropriate — or entertaining — to deliver it to incarcerated individuals. This practice risks spreading food poisoning and creates a feeling of dehumanization among the incarcerated population. Those of us who are incarcerated are human beings, and we should be guaranteed dignity and access to nutritious food.