Voice of Russia
MIAMI — Just a month after a federal judge ordered the Florida Department of Corrections to provide kosher meals to inmates, thousands are lining up to request the food. And not all of them are Jewish.
Despite having a significant Jewish community and the country’s third largest prison population, the state stopped offering kosher food or catering to other religious dietary requirements on grounds of cost in 2007, NYT reports.
However, a federal judge Patricia Seitz of the U.S. District Court in Miami last month ruled that the prisons service had to provide kosher meals for all inmates “with a sincere religious basis for keeping kosher” by July 1, saying Florida had violated a law in 2000 protecting inmates’ religious freedom. Last April, facing an inmate lawsuit, Florida began a pilot program for the religious diet at Union Correctional Facility near Jacksonville.
Initially, some 250 inmates signed up but once other inmates saw the individually boxed lunches, 863 expressed a sudden interest in keeping kosher. The reasons are: in a caged world of few choices, the meals are a novelty, a chance to break from the usual ritual of prison life. Others believe the kosher turkey cutlets and spaghetti and meatballs simply taste better.
Full stories: Florida inmates: sudden change of eating habits