Last month I had to prepare material on the topic of what they feed in Russian prisons, according to the stories of prisoners. It turned out that not everything is so simple, since the information on this issue is very controversial. From official sources, I understood that the state provides prisoners with three meals a day, including a standard set of products. The menu is drawn up taking into account that the same dish should not be prepared in prison more than twice a week.
It seems that everything is clear and there are no questions, but when I read several interviews and stories of prisoners who served their sentences and can actually confirm what they were fed in MLS (places of deprivation of liberty), it turned out that in reality everything is completely different.
In today’s article, I will try to compile from the stories and interviews of prisoners that I have read on this topic, everything that concerns the provision of food to prisoners in Russian prisons. I warn you right away that the reality is very different from the rules established by current legislation.
What do convicts eat for breakfast and dinner?
Cooks must monitor the variety of prisoners' menus and prepare main courses in several types: fried, stewed and boiled.
What do they feed in the zone in Russia? Here is an approximate daily menu:
- Morning meal: hot oatmeal with water or milk, black or white bread, hot tea with sugar. It is acceptable to prepare vegetable stew.
- The daily meal is a salad of fresh vegetables (cabbage, carrots) or pickles, soup with rice in broth, boiled chicken, buckwheat porridge, dried fruit compote or jelly.
- Evening meal: Barley with meat balls, bread, sweet tea.
How do life-sentenced prisoners live in prison? Read about it here.
Preparation
To prepare this potato soup, you don’t need a lot of effort, much less any special skills.
Place a pan of water on the stove. Before it boils, let's start preparing the products. Peel the onion and finely chop it. Wash the potatoes and grate them along with the peel. So wash your potatoes thoroughly. We recommend using young tubers. Add potatoes and onions to the pan and cook over medium heat.
While our ingredients for the prison gruel recipe are being cooked, we take sprouted wheat grains. We wash them, dry them a little, and then grind them using a coffee grinder or food processor.
Wash all the greens and shake off any drops of water. The shoots of young thistle and nettle also need to be washed and finely chopped for the prison gruel recipe. Finely chop the greens and add them together with the ground wheat to the pan. Cook for another 15 minutes.
Then we prepare the flour dressing. Take any flour and pour a little cold water into it, and then mix. When the dressing turns a slightly cloudy color, pour it into the soup and stir constantly. Then cook for a few more minutes and add salt and pepper.
The dish prepared according to the prison gruel recipe is ready. This dish has been on the prisoners’ menu for a long time. Although in some regions gruel is still found.
New rules
The main innovations that came into force along with Order No. 44689 of December 14, 2016:
- First courses, such as soups, are necessarily prepared in boiled meat and fish broths.
Food must be served warm. The menu is more varied; dishes from the same type of products should not be repeated throughout the day. The number of dishes and the number of calories that people receive from food are prescribed. Thus, the daily caloric intake for a man ranges from 2600-3000 kcal. - Additionally, the text of the document contains technological tables indicating the rules for processing meat products, recommendations for summer and winter menus, and tips for improving the taste of dishes.
- The document also spells out regulations according to which both the administration of prisons, which deals with the supply of food, and the cooks, who are responsible for arranging food for the week and forming the composition of the daily menu, must act.
However, there are a number of unresolved important issues that require careful attention.
Thus, the quality of the products that end up on prisoners’ tables leaves much to be desired, and this has not yet been checked or regulated by executive authorities.
A tender for the supply of food, organized by representatives of the prison administration, is most often won by the organization that offers the most favorable price for its services, and the customer receives a kickback of up to 20% of the order amount.
According to the incoming documentation, products of the same quality are supplied, while prisoners are offered food products that have expired and, accordingly, are much cheaper.
For comparison: in prisons in Europe and the United States, a separate menu is offered for vegetarians, adherents of a certain religion and those who suffer from diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, and a therapeutic dietary menu for such prisoners is developed by the prison doctor.
In most European cities, prisoners have the right to work and spend the money they earn on improving the quality of food.
The food in prison is better than in the hospital
Tuesday, 03/07/2017 13:54 Headings: News, Society Views: [post_view]
The leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service has approved new rules for feeding prisoners. Now the heads of Russian pre-trial detention centers, colonies and prisons will have to ensure that the prisoners’ menu is varied and that the food served is hot, reports Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which has reviewed the document. In the food layout for the week, the same dishes should not be repeated more than two or three times.
The daily ration of a prisoner in Russia should be 2600-3000 k/cal. At the same time, it is forbidden to feed prisoners dishes that are prepared from the same products. That is, if at lunch the first meal was millet soup, then the second meal could no longer be served with millet porridge.
The first courses cooked behind bars should be based mainly on meat broth, and fish soups are allowed only in exceptional cases: fish cannot be a substitute for meat, according to the order of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Fish soup on the prisoner's table will be acceptable if sausages, sausages, and canned meat are planned for the second meal. But it is recommended to plan dinner from a fish dish with a vegetable or cereal side dish, bread, sugar and tea.
Temperature conditions and food quality control rules are also prescribed. Meals in the dining room must be served no earlier than 10-15 minutes before prisoners arrive in the dining room. Prepared food is served only hot. For first courses, the temperature norm is 75 degrees, for second courses - 65 degrees, for tea - 80 degrees. It is prohibited to pour iced tea.
As a result, an example of a prison menu for adult prisoners will look like this. Breakfast: porridge (possibly milk) or vegetable stew, tea with sugar, bread. Lunch: salad (for example, pickled tomatoes and cucumbers), first course, second course, bread, compote (or jelly, and jelly and tea alternate every other day). For the first course, cabbage soup made from fresh cabbage. For the second course, beef goulash with boiled pasta and sauce. For dinner, fried navaga fish with mashed potatoes, tea and bread. The volume of first courses is set at 0.5 - 0.6 liters, and the weight of second courses must be at least 200 grams.
It is noted that the leadership of the FSIN intends to achieve an increase and diversity of the prison diet not so much by increasing costs (in 2016, 77 rubles were allocated for feeding one prisoner per day), but by developing its own agricultural and food production in the colonies.
Meanwhile, in Russian hospitals, on the contrary, due to insufficient funding, food costs have decreased and amount to an average of 60 rubles per patient per day.
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Instead of an afterword
This article is collected from the stories of those who had the opportunity to visit pre-trial detention centers and prisons of our vast Motherland. We know that there are many former prisoners among our readers. If you notice an inaccuracy or can add something interesting to this article, write in the comments or on We are sure that your knowledge will help many readers not get into trouble if they happen to go to prison.
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Dream Interpretation - Prison, imprisonment
Being trapped is an interesting event in a dream. While this is a cause of concern for some, the upside of confinement is its relative privacy and protection from the threats of the hostile world on the other side of the walls. Typically, the security aspect is ignored due to our obsession with freedom. The dream of being trapped contains a hint of introspection, as the old saying goes: “Wherever you go, take yourself with you.” When applied to dreams, failure to escape may indicate failure to achieve something particularly desirable in life. When interpreting such a dream, it is useful to proceed from the ideas of JUNG, as set out in his theory of the primary INDIVIDUALITY. Confinement can be interpreted as either a lack of choice or an excess of it. The lack of choice is obvious in the case of a person sleeping in a one-room cell; an excess of choice is a multi-room mansion with no exits. Another option: no matter where you go, you cannot find a way out. Such a dream may indicate that with many options, there is no single effective one for achieving those new freedoms and opportunities that you are striving for. The path to escape from imprisonment is often encoded in the personalities of those who captured you, or the location of the dungeon. For a more accurate interpretation of the dream, try to find familiar features in your guards, the decoration of the house, as well as the reason for your desire to escape. Perhaps you feel discomfort from unwillingness to follow the orders of others or feel the presence of a real threat within the walls of a prison, mansion, or trap building? Some trap buildings are for safety, others are for punishment. What state are you in in your dream? When you wake up, what feelings do you have about the place that in your dream served as a safe hiding place and did not contain anything mysterious?
Dream Interpretation – Food
This symbol is associated with prosperity, hospitality and friendliness. It has always been believed that the workers in the family, that is, men, should be given the best piece. Food, according to our ancestors, was sent by God, so one should never condemn what one eats; one should rejoice at any food and thank the Almighty for his mercy. There was a ritual of eating food: they ate from one cauldron in turns. In this regard, a number of sayings about kinship arose. It was believed that strangers became related while eating food from the same cauldron. To dream that you are sitting at a table laden with many dishes and carefully emptying the plates one after another - to the guests; You have to prepare a complex and responsible event; to illness. To see a person who can barely stand on his feet from hunger, but when he sits down to eat, he loses consciousness - this dream foreshadows unexpected troubles with distant relatives; to hunger; to malaise; accident on the street. To dream that you are present at dinner and all the dishes seem bland to you, and after dinner seasonings are served to the table - this dream means that someone will make you a promise that they cannot keep on time, and will offer help when they can. late; to belated news; to meeting a person whom you were looking for in the past, but never found. Seeing a skinny person who meticulously picks at the porridge on a plate and eats almost nothing, but only talks about his dislike for porridge - to deal with an inexperienced and awkward person who is unable to stand up for himself; You will find yourself in a situation that will require good physical preparation from you; to the dissatisfaction of younger family members. Seeing in a dream a table full of food, which does not evoke any feeling in you other than indifference, but you force yourself to sit down at the table and understand that you have made the right decision - this dream foreshadows a strong-willed decision that will have to be made in the near future; You don’t like the environment that surrounds you; You will participate in an activity that is contrary to your mood and desires, but will later bring satisfaction.
Composition and calorie content
In accordance with Order No. 696, the amount of calories consumed by a prisoner must reach 2600-3000 Kcal/day, so the menu is compiled based on this value.
Sample menu for the day and what the dishes are called in the language of the convicts
Breakfast:
- porridge (semolina, oatmeal, millet, pearl barley) - “gruel”;
- mixed bread - “ammonar”, if the bread is white - “Belinsky”;
- tea with sugar - “chifir with balagas”.
Dinner:
- salad or pickles (cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers);
- soup (rassolnik, cabbage soup, kharcho) - “bitter ration”;
- meat (fish with mashed potatoes, boiled chicken with rice, goulash with pasta);
- dried fruit compote - “uzvar”.
Dinner:
- sausages, fish (or meatballs) with porridge (buckwheat, pearl barley), dumplings;
- tea with sugar - “chifir with balagas”;
- black, white bread - “ammonar and belinsky”.
There is also an afternoon snack, during which the convict can drink juice.
Differences for different correctional institutions
There are several types of organizations in Russia that are designed for the temporary detention of criminals or delinquents. The management of these institutions uses different principles of catering.
Therefore, the following rules are taken into account:
- if the court imposes a sentence on the basis of which the criminal must serve his sentence in a penal colony, then before the trip he is equipped with certain food products, although the trip to the institution itself is paid directly by the convicted person;
- during the trip, you are given a dry ration, which includes bread and tea, canned meat or vegetables, and also meat porridge and stew;
- upon arrival, the prisoner receives three full meals a day, and it is varied and healthy, so meat dishes, cereals, stewed meat, pickles and even squash caviar are provided;
- prisoners can receive parcels from relatives, and it is allowed to transfer cheese, butter, sausages, fish, confectionery, milk and even chocolate, but it is important to properly package all food products, which are carefully examined by correctional officers.
If a relative wants to give a prisoner cheese or sausage, as well as fish, then only products that are in vacuum packaging are purchased, and only sterilized milk is selected.
In many prisons, illegal prisoners can buy various food products, sweets, honey or cigarettes. The sales are carried out by employees of the institution, who receive a certain material benefit from this process. When calling home or visiting relatives, prisoners often ask for certain products because they lack fresh fruit and confectionery.
Does the prison diet depend on the detention regime?
How and what do they feed in a high security zone? There are no differences in nutrition not only depending on the regime of the institution, but also the regime of the prisoner’s stay there (light/regular/strict regime of imprisonment). But there are differences in the parcels, which means, remotely, we can say that the food will still be different, since relatives may deliver parcels more often in some cases.
Chapter 16 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation determines the possible number of food shipments for prisoners in prisons of different regimes:
- General regime – 1 parcel per 6 months is allowed.
- Strict regime – 1 parcel per year is allowed.
Prisoners and colonies can spend money earned for performing work and, above this limit, a certain amount of the minimum wage.
For this purpose, a personal cash account is opened, which can be replenished by his family and friends. From such an account he can buy additional products to supplement his ration.
Products that can be purchased:
- chips, crackers, snacks;
- instant noodles;
- pastries, cakes;
- Tea coffee.
Depending on the conditions of detention, convicts can spend the following amounts of money on food:
- General mode. No restrictions under light conditions, 3 minimum wages under normal conditions, 2 minimum wages under strict conditions.
- Strict regime. 3 minimum wages under light conditions, 2 minimum wages under normal conditions, 1 minimum wage under strict conditions.
- . 2 minimum wages under light conditions, 1 minimum wage under normal conditions, 70% of earnings under strict conditions.
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General questions on the topic
As I said, information on this issue varies. The authorities adhere to the official position, although the other side of the issue is often also touched upon. I will not give the nutritional standards for convicts that are in force today, since they have nothing to do with reality, but I will try to tell you what people in prison actually eat.
How it happens that one thing appears on paper, but in reality something else happens, cannot always be explained. In such a situation, the contractors who bring low-quality products to the MLS may be to blame, or the prison management, which does not want to pay attention to this issue. In any case, the situation is extremely unpleasant, even taking into account the fact that the people who committed the crime are in prison.
