Tuesday 25 November 2008

Shock: Prisoners eat proper meals

Once again the Sun has been blatantly stoking the anti-Muslim feelings within its readers.

MUSLIM prisoners at a top security jail were bought £3,500 worth of takeaway curries, it emerged last night.

The Sun seems to think that prisoners should have to subsist on bread and water... The prison
holds 458 people
(which the Sun does confirm), and according to the Sun one-third of whom are Muslim, i.e. 152 people. This works out at £23 each which is not an unreasonable amount for a proper curry from a restaurant.

Prison officers drove 40 miles to a restaurant after inmates moaned jail meals were not tasty enough.

The Sun doesn't say whether or not this is a round-trip. However, I admit that does seem to be something to complain about, as surely there must have been a closer curry house. Unfortunately, I'm unable to locate the prison and its neighbouring restaurants.

A non-Muslim ex-inmate at Whitemoor jail said: “They tried to do the curries in-house but the prison chefs couldn’t meet the budget of £1.80 per prisoner — and the Muslim inmates complained that it tasted rubbish.

That's probably because you can't even do a cheap and nasty curry on that amount of money. I know that to make one dirt-cheap you're talking at least £5.00.

And the curries were not checked for smuggled weapons on the way into prison in case they got COLD, sources said.

After all, a garlic naan bread is the most likely place to stash a gun.

I wonder if the Sun would have a similar article about the amount spent on Passover meals or Divali, never mind Christmas lunch.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Apart from the usual idiocy of the Sun's reporting, it does (if true) seem very bizarre that a prison would spend money on take away curry or any other kind of food because the inmates didn't like the prison food.

Is it just me? Please tell me I haven't turned into a right-wing nutjob.

septicisle said...

No, you haven't. I suspect however that even prisons usually do something "special" at Christmas, and the end of Ramadan/Eid is about the closest Islam comes to a similar festival. Whitemoor has come in for criticism for the way it's being run, so wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this was undertaken to head off the possibility of a riot...