Schmidt, Claire. 2017. Review of Prison Food In America. 
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 70. © American Folklore Society 2018

Review of:

Prison Food In America
Erika Camplin. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Studies in 
Food and Gastronomy, 2017. Pp. 139, index. 

By: Claire Schmidt

Erika Camplin’s Prison Food in America is described on the cover blurb as “a 
high level snapshot.” As a whole, the text is a useful introduction to the study 
of food in prison. It covers a lot of ground in order to paint a broad picture and 
address an important topic about which there is no other current scholarly 
book-length work. 

Prison Food in America is quite short and very accessible to a general audience 
and undergraduate students. There are eight chapters comprising 106 pages, 
plus end note references and an index. The book is very broad in its approach, 
encompassing history, economics, race, ethics, class, popular culture, politics, 
and sociology as it explores food in prison in the contemporary United States 
(with a short glimpse of Norway) as well as historically in both the United States 
and Great Britain. 

The first chapter raises the main concerns of the book: 1) the United States 
incarcerates its people at a far greater rate than any other nation, meaning 
that, per Camplin’s calculations, the US provides about 6 million meals per 
day; 2) food, poverty, profit, and race are inextricably linked in American 
institutions; 3) food lies at the heart of conflicting ideologies about punishment 
and rehabilitation; and 4) we can and should do better as a nation if we wish to 
address root causes of poverty, institutional racism, and health inequalities. 

Chapter 2 gives a very brief and selective history of prison food in England 
and the United States. Chapter 3 focuses on the economics of prison food and 
chapter 4 covers menus, nutritional and safety oversight (or lack thereof), and 
specialized diets. These two chapters (and chapter 6, on the commissary) make 
the strongest contribution to prison food scholarship. The reproduced menus, 
nutritional guidelines, and commissary forms are valuable artifacts and will 
be quite helpful for future scholars and students. The interrogation of profit, 
incarceration, and ethics in chapter 3 is timely. Chapter 5 explores food as 



Schmidt, Claire. 2017. Review of Prison Food In America.
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 71. © American Folklore Society 2018

protest and punishment, chapter 7 focuses on the rehabilitative possibilities of 
food production, and the final chapter explores last meals before executions.  

From a scholarly point of view, the methodology is unclear. A great deal of the 
supporting material comes from blogs, fora, government websites, and online 
news sources like Vice. Some scholarly sources are incorporated into the text, 
including work by folklorist Steve Siporin and prison food scholar Amy Smoyer, 
but the balance of the material is populist rather than academic. Folklorists 
may question the context of some personal experience narratives in the text. 
For example, references to and quotes from “my inmate friend” pepper the 
book, but no explanation is provided about the author’s relationship to the 
inmate friend, why the author has chosen to incorporate this information, how 
the information was gathered, whether the friend played a role in the overall 
conception of the book, or how that friend’s experience of prison and prison 
food may be influenced by his cultural background. 

Further, the structure of the book is inconsistent. Some chapters have a clear 
introductory passage while others do not. One chapter has a formal conclusion 
section with a header while the other seven chapters just stop without bringing 
the main ideas together into a concluding section or paragraph. The voice 
is also unpredictable: some paragraphs are written like a scholarly treatise, 
while other paragraphs read like a hyperbolic Buzzfeed piece. Camplin is 
generally very careful to avoid othering and essentializing inmates, but the final 
section of the book on last meals (chapter 8) feels sensationalized, particularly 
because the chapter, and book, end abruptly on a list of “notorious last meals” 
and give the reader no conclusion at all to the book as a whole. The concepts 
and topics often lack synthesis and the primary and secondary sources lack 
contextualization and critical analysis. As with other books in this series, image 
quality is inconsistent. More care from the editorial department would likely 
have resulted in a more functional and effective book.

The text is impassioned and focused on raising awareness of an immediate 
opportunity for social change for the betterment of the humanity of the entire 
United States. While I wish it had been longer and more substantial, Prison 
Food in America opens the door for future scholars to respond by engaging 
deeply with issues brought to the fore in this present volume.