On August 21, 2021—the 50th anniversary of the murder of George Jackson at San Quentin State Prison—we are honored to release our zine on food in Maryland’s prisons during Covid-19. Click here to read and download the full zine.

What is happening behind bars during the pandemic is unimaginable. People testing positive for Covid are being shackled to beds in makeshift tents and made to suffer for weeks. Others are left to die alone in their cells, and their bodies are pulled out clandestinely by staff days later.

On top of this, prison food conditions have gotten even more despicable. This zine covers how carceral food service from 2020 onwards is another invisibilized way in which the state is dehumanizing and killing people in its custody during the pandemic. From incarcerated folks developing ulcerative colitis and Hepatitis B as a result of nutritionally bankrupt meals; to commissary providers exploiting hunger by extracting even more profit from a captive population; to prisons extending the sentences of people who protest and sending them to maximum security prisons as punishment, the prison eating experience during Covid-19 is nothing short of a means of premature death.

To those fighting for food sovereignty or food justice on the outside—we cannot create an equitable or “just” food system while prisons still stand. To those fighting for the dismantling of prisons—or even to improve the conditions of confinement—we cannot overlook the violence of prison food and its role as a form of punishment and dehumanization. The only “humane” prison is one that is burnt to the ground.