By Dan Nephin
Intelligencer Journal/New Era
LANCASTER, Pa. — The comfort food Lancaster County Prison inmates are whipping up in their cells is giving the warden indigestion.
The seasoned dish, called chi chi, isn’t the problem.
The problem is that some inmates toss the wrappers containing ingredients and the trash bags used in making the dish into the toilet instead of their trash cans.
Getting inmates to properly dispose of trash instead of flushing it down the toilet is an ongoing problem at the prison. The county has spent about $200,000 over the last couple years on possible remedies.
Trash must be separated from the flow of waste because it can foul the city’s sewer system.
A year ago, the county bought 633 small plastic trash cans for $2,830 to put in cells in hopes the inmates would use them instead of toilets for trash. Before that, inmates didn’t have trash cans in their cells.
That came after the county spent $196,250 in 2011 to have a conveyor system installed to separate trash from sewage.
Whatever is flushed down the prison’s 700-odd toilets flows into a roughly 10-foot-deep concrete box buried outside the prison’s wall.
There, the mix flows onto an angled conveyor, where metal fingers separate noodle wrappers, chip and pretzel bags, orange peels and trash bags from the water and human waste, which continues into the city’s sewer system.
The fingers carry the trash along the conveyor, where it falls into a sectioned area at the base of the structure.
Since the conveyor was installed, there haven’t been any more problems for the city’s sewer system, said Charlotte Katzenmoyer, director of public works.
But the prison still has to get rid of the trash.
When enough trash accumulates, a trash hauler vacuums it out at $750 per suction and disposes it as biohazard waste.
Before the trash cans were bought for the cells, the prison was getting trash sucked out about every four days, according to Robert Devonshire Jr., prison maintenance supervisor.
“Then we stretched it out to about once every two weeks; then something changed and ... everybody got flush happy again,” he said Monday.
Inmates recently were again told they have to use the trash cans. But changing institutional behavior is a work in progress, said Paul Smeal, the prison’s acting warden.
“Hopefully, through continued work with it, it will get better,” he said.
The prison has also taken steps to prevent inmates from getting trashbags to make chi chi.
Inmates would swipe the bags, used for cleanup after meals, when they would be placed on carts used for delivery of food.
“Once we discovered that, we put a new process in place where that trash is picked up separately after the meal carts go out,” Smeal said.
Inmates will still get the bags, he said, but he hopes they won’t get as many.
“They’re going to get them. This is a prison. Trust me,” Smeal said.
“If they could just quit ... putting the garbage bags down the toilet, I’d really have no issues with the chi chi. It’s just the bags going down the toilets that’s the problem.”
The dish is well-known throughout jails and prisons.
Recipes vary and are dependent on what inmates can get at the prison commissary. Common ingredients include ramen noodles, meat snack sticks, cheese, sugar and spicy chips.
The recipe: Crush the noodles and chips, tear the cheese and meat into bits and mix with hot tap water in a clean trash bag. Let it set for a bit and then enjoy.
In other words, it’s your basic salt-fat-sugar comfort food. Inmates whip up the dish to complement the prison meal plan.
Smeal also reduced the amount of money inmates can spend in the commissary from $100 to $75 a week, figuring that will cut down on trash.
Could he just get rid of the commissary items that end up in toilet?
“Without commissary, (prison) would not be a happy place,” Smeal said.
Copyright 2013 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.