Today I had lunch in a prison.

It was just as vile as you might imagine.

A choice of meat pie, pasty or samosa with rice or potatoes (at least I think that is what they were, I can’t be sure). There was not a fresh vegetable or piece of fruit in sight. There was a "vegetable casserole" but I am not counting that since the only discernable components were peas and corn; ergo, it looked more like something that one’s body might expel than something one should be consuming. (Perhaps not so) sadly, I do not have a picture I can show you as we were not allowed to take cameras into the prison.

You would be forgiven for wondering what on earth I was doing eating lunch in a prison. The Howard League for Penal Reform is a charity which campaigns for less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison. They advocate that in most cases prison is ineffective in rehabilitating offenders and inevitably leads to reoffending, suggesting community sentences as an alternative for people on short-term sentences or for those that have committed non-violent offences. They also provide a legal advice service for children and young people in custody.

Today’s lunch was a fundraising event for the Howard League aimed at giving people who would not usually have any contact with prisoners or prisons a perspective on what it is like to be inside. A chance to see that prisoners are often just average individuals, more often than not from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds, whose unfortunate circumstances have led them to turn to crime.

In order to give the guests a realistic perspective, visitors were not treated to a special lunch. They ate prison food. Apparently, the budget for an adult male's food for an entire day is £2.20. This provides them with 2000 calories a day, 550 less than recommended for a healthy adult male. The budget is even smaller for a child in custody, despite evidence that they require higher levels of nutrition. 

I had intended to write an entirely different post tonight, but when I got home all I could think about was vegetables: 

Hardly worth blogging a recipe for, but I thought the reason behind my unusually green dinner worth sharing.