The Less Eligible Eaters: Calorie Counts, No-Frills, and Vending Machines in Prison

The Least Eligibility Principle (LEP) has been variously engaged throughout US history to sort service populations into the deserving and undeserving. The no-frills prison policy movement of the 1990s was heavily influenced by LEP morality. Food was one focal point of the discourses and policies that negotiated the floating signifier “least” to place prisoners at the bottom of the presumed hierarchy, encouraging a punitive penal diet. Based on ethnographic data collected from a US prison for women, I explore women’s practices that negotiate their relationship to this diet. Following Abu-Lughod’s (1990) suggestion, I consider these daily acts of resistance to reveal the workings of power. The hollowed-out diet disciplines as it presupposes the moral classification of LEP, indexing the unworthiness of those who must consume it. The impacts of the disciplinary diet are far-reaching, encouraging the accumulation of debt while incarcerated and placing unyielding financial pressure on incarcerated individuals’ kin networks. State and civil society are continuous in the ideological negotiation that supports the punitive penal diet. Women’s practices that challenge the moral implications of this diet claim humanity and dignity in a system that presupposes their unworthiness and positions them as morally bankrupt.