Editor's Note: This story was amended on Dec. 21, 2018 to correctly identify that Arizona State University is the school where Professor Jose Ashford is affiliated.

DARTMOUTH — A block of instant ramen makes you rich here.

Inmates buy it by the armful from the mail-order commissary, because salty noodles taste better than jail food.

In a lunchroom at the Bristol County House of Correction, inmate Gordon Davis scoffs at the menu on the wall. For the day’s lunch, it reads, “Chef’s Special (Chicken).”

The “special” is three steamed chicken hot dogs, without buns, served over rice. It comes with two slices of untoasted wheat bread, unfrosted brownish-yellow cake, a scoop of flavorless mixed vegetables and a packet of mustard.

"There's no chef special," he says. "There's nothing special."

More than monotony lies behind the complaints that sparked food protests at the jail this summer, a Standard-Times investigation has found.

Most Bristol County inmates — including people presumed innocent while they await trial — received no fresh fruits or vegetables in their diets until after The Standard-Times began to investigate. The jail has since changed its policy to allow each person two apples a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The Standard-Times also found expired food in the pantry and meals some inmates consider inedible or too small, pushing them to rely on high-priced snacks from the commissary.

Sheriff Thomas Hodgson says his low-cost menu protects the taxpayers, and the food is not intended as punishment.

But if the purpose of jail is to stop crime and deter it, should the food make inmates angry?

The men in Unit 2 West were eager to talk. Sam Rodriguez complained of “hockey-puck” meat and of cartilage in the turkey burgers. Hot dogs are the best meal, he said.

“A lot of people, they ... give their trays away because they can’t eat some of this stuff,” he said.

The shape of one particularly reviled entree earned it the name “D meat.”

“We don’t even know what it is,” he said.

And if anyone needs help remembering food from the outside, all they have to do is witness the very same kitchen making delicious food for correctional officers who work overtime. Inmates working in the kitchen get to eat it.

“Chicken on the bone,” Davis said, emphasizing the words like he’s holding a knife and fork, napkin tied around his neck. And real burgers, he said.

NOT SO FAST

“I bet you they have better conditions than my husband who is deployed,” one commenter wrote on Facebook after The Standard-Times reported this summer that inmates were protesting over the food.

“They can suck it up or not commit crime,” she said.

The Bristol County jails include three facilities on the Dartmouth campus — the House of Correction, the Women’s Center, and an immigration detention center operated in cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — plus the 19th-century Ash Street Jail in New Bedford.

The House of Correction held an average of 1,010 people a day in the 12-month period that ended in September 2017, according to a state report. The Women's Center held 90, and Ash Street, which holds mainly people awaiting trial, had 186. The report did not include the ICE building.

At least 60 people in ICE detention went on a hunger strike in July. How long it lasted is unclear. The sheriff’s office and the anti-deportation group Families for Freedom gave conflicting accounts ranging from less than two days to several.

After the ICE hunger strike, nearly 250 inmates in the main jail skipped at least one prepared meal the following week. Hodgson denied it was a true hunger strike, saying they ate food from the commissary instead of their prepared meals.

Many people on the outside view unappetizing jail food as part of the punishment or a reflection of taxpayers’ right to keep expenses low.

“I’m not paying more taxes so they can have steak,” one commenter responded to a Standard-Times story.

Hodgson said money is a big part of his decision-making about the food.

“It’s financial, and it’s also nutritional,” he said.

“I always tell people, ‘Look, [if you want] cake, cookies, you want more ounces of orange juice or what have you, don’t come here,” he said. “You can have all you want on the outside. But we’re not going to have taxpayers pay extra money for food beyond what they’re already paying for the cost of care here.”

In reality, inmates do not get any juice. Nor do they get coffee. The beverage they sometimes call “juice” is a powder mixed with water. They do get a small carton of milk with breakfast.

THREE SQUARES

“Eat your colors,” a popular nugget of health advice, is based on the science of fruits and vegetables. At the Bristol County House of Correction, most of the color in the meals comes from plain steamed vegetables and artificially colored drinks — and now the twice-weekly apple.

Otherwise, inmates are looking at a sea of beige: potatoes about six days a week, rice about five days a week, and two slices of untoasted wheat bread at nearly every lunch and dinner.

The menu follows a 35-day cycle. Often, potatoes, bread and muffin-like cake are served in the same meal, even at lunch. The carbohydrate count is significant.

For example, lunch on Day 23 includes meatloaf, instant mashed potatoes, bread, margarine and cake. The only other items are green beans and “fortified punch,” a red drink that contains artificial sweetener but no fruit juice or sugar.

Hodgson allowed The Standard-Times to visit Unit 2 West, which inmate Devin Salvucci described as the cleanest unit in the jail.

Inmates eat their meals in the dayroom, an expanse of four-person tables. The walls are posted with messages about addiction recovery and self-improvement. Painted along the top are the words, “STRENGTH HOPE RECOVERY LIFE.”

Most of the unit’s inmates have a history of substance use and a co-occurring mental health issue, but not severe mental illness, a correctional officer said.

At the time of the interviews, before the addition of apples, the men in the unit said not a single piece of fresh produce was served in the jail — not a shred of lettuce or a slice of tomato. The one exception was that people on medical diets received apples in place of foods they could not eat.

That’s not necessarily the norm nationally, according to Sara Wakefield, an associate professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University who studies the effects of incarceration on inmates’ health, families and well-being.

“In my experience, limited to some state prisons, that is unusual,” she said.

Before the switch to apples, inmates got canned fruit or applesauce. At the time of our visit, they had not received canned fruit for a while, because the jail had plenty of applesauce in stock.

The jail buys food through a broker based on nutritional needs, availability and price. It does not restock specific items.

In addition to the monotony, inmates complained bitterly about bones and cartilage in the turkey burgers. Once, when someone filed a grievance, food service director Avelino Alves broke up a turkey burger to show the grievance coordinator, and he didn’t find any bones or cartilage, Alves said.

“They don’t like the turkey burger, but I have to have a turkey burger,” he said.

He said the jail serves no pork products, partly because of religious diets and partly because “it’s just easier.”

As for fresh vegetables, “We used to serve salad years ago, but nobody was eating it,” he said.

DIETITIAN’S REVIEW

Menus are reviewed by a part-time dietitian. In July, Darling said the dietitian was not comfortable speaking to the media but would answer emailed questions if the messages went through his office.

Not long afterward, she resigned, effective Aug. 6, two weeks after The Standard-Times requested an interview with her and 17 days after the newspaper first reported on the hunger strike. She cited increased demands at her full-time job, Darling said.

The Standard-Times was unable to reach her afterward.

Simmons University dietitian Sharon Gallagher, an associate professor of practice in the nutrition and dietetics program, reviewed the Bristol County jail menu and meal photos at the newspaper’s request.

“It doesn’t seem so horrible to me,” she said.

Gallagher, who has experience reviewing menus for assisted living facilities, said more fresh fruit would be nice, but she knows institutions have to operate with their budgets.

“Of course I would love to see fresh fruit on the tray. I just don’t know if it’s possible based on their constraints,” she said, in an interview conducted before the jail introduced apples twice a week.

Although the trays might visually seem to hold a lot of starches, Gallagher said the carb count “doesn’t seem that off” given that 50 to 60 percent of calories in a person’s diet should come from carbohydrates.

A dietary analysis provided by the jail shows an average of 54.4 percent of calories in the meals comes from carbohydrates, 31.9 percent from fat and 13.7 percent from protein.

Gallagher said the three-hot-dog lunch could be high in sodium, but institutions often have to balance sodium over the course of a week to make the meals palatable. One day might be higher, another day lower.

“I would be concerned if every single day there were three hot dogs on the plate,” she said.

Hodgson said his menu meets nutritional and caloric guidelines. Its average daily calorie count is 2,710.

“Most of these people that come in here probably don’t have great nutritional guidelines in their own everyday life,” he said. “So I’m not going to apologize for helping them to understand that eating nutritionally well is good for them. Most of them, if they’re being honest with you, will tell you that they leave here more healthy than when they came in.”

EXPIRED FOOD

“Look at the dates!” shouted an inmate working in the kitchen. And look we did.

In the freezer and pantry, The Standard-Times discovered numerous past dates on boxes and bags of food. But Alves said most of those dates are dates of manufacture, not “best by” dates. Paperwork in his office lists the shelf life of each item, he said.

And yet, canned peaches and bagged potato flakes were sitting in the pantry after their best-by dates. The peaches were clearly marked, “Best By 07 07 18,” a date about three weeks past.

Dates on the potato flakes were from the summer of 2016. Although those were manufacturing dates, Alves checked the paperwork and discovered their shelf life was only two years.

The potato flakes were already too old to serve when they were delivered to the jail, according Darling, the sheriff’s spokesman. He said 27 bags of potato flakes were sent back to the manufacturer as a result of the Standard-Times inquiry.

So, does the Dartmouth jail serve expired food?

“To our knowledge, that hasn’t been a problem,” Hodgson said.

But after the potato-flake discovery, the jail changed how it monitors the expiration dates. Hodgson said he directed the staff to place copies of the shelf-life information in the receiving area, so employees can check the dates when food first arrives, before it gets transferred to the pantry.

Federal law does not require expiration dates, except on infant formula. States can write stronger regulations.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which regulates food labels, does not require frozen or long-shelf-life foods to carry a “best by” date, according to agency spokeswoman Ann Scales.

Dates on shelf-stable food generally mark the time when quality could start to decline. They do not mean the food is unsafe.

WORSE THAN OTHERS?

People who land in jail often land in more than one. A handful of Dartmouth inmates said the food compares poorly with jails in Plymouth or Dedham where they have served time, largely because of the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables.

In Plymouth County lockup, inmates got lettuce, tomatoes, bananas, apples and beans, according to inmate Gordon Davis. Beans are relatively rare in Dartmouth.

“If we got beans, there’d be a little more protein in our diet,” he said.

Fellow Dartmouth inmate Wayne Nickerson corroborated Davis’ account of the food in Plymouth. He said the difference was palpable.

“My first day waking up there, to food and breakfast and everything, I thought I was in a hotel. I swear,” he said.

He got salad and fish. And the portions seemed bigger.

“The food is hot. It’s all-the-way cooked. It tasted better,” he said. “The food is more healthy all the way around.”

In Plymouth County, the jail is run by Sheriff Joseph McDonald, who, like Hodgson, is a Republican in a largely blue state. Both were among the three Massachusetts sheriffs who signed a letter to Congress in March on immigration. But when it comes to food service, their jails have some differences.

Bristol County estimates its cost per meal at 75 cents for food only, not labor. It runs its food service operation in-house, buying food through a broker.

According to Hodgson, Bristol’s per-inmate costs are the lowest in the state, and the food still meets nutritional standards. “Which is something we’re very proud of,” he said.

Plymouth pays $1.66 per meal for a contract with Trinity Services Group, which procures the food and provides employees to assist in supervision, meal preparation, distribution and cleanup, according to John Birtwell, a spokesman for McDonald. Trinity also provides certain equipment, such as pots and pans. Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department personnel coordinate operations and keep watch on inmate workers.

The Plymouth County Sheriff's Department did not allow The Standard-Times to visit, so the real-life quality of the food is difficult to compare. But on paper, Plymouth does serve more fresh produce: shredded lettuce, sliced tomato and bananas, in addition to apples.

Plymouth provides buns for hamburgers and hot dogs, whereas Bristol does not. The Bristol jails give inmates wheat bread instead. Twice in a 35-day menu cycle, Plymouth serves a hamburger with lettuce, tomato, cheese and a bun. Other days, the burger comes with barbeque sauce and a bun, or with onion gravy and no bun.

The Plymouth jail receives thousands of bananas at a time and stores them in a warehouse until they are needed for the approximately 1,000 meals served at each sitting. If the bananas are too green, the jail serves apples and moves the bananas to another day. Change-ups are relatively rare, Birtwell said.

He said Plymouth does not serve fresh oranges because they can be hoarded to make alcohol. The same goes for fresh juices or any similar product that could be fermented, because of “obvious security and health risks,” he said in an email.

What makes fresh produce challenging is not cost, but washing, keeping it at the right temperature, preventing the brewing of alcohol and meeting nutritional guidelines, Birtwell said.

Bristol serves some items that don’t appear on the Plymouth menu, like pudding and processed egg patties. But Bristol inmates are more likely to see frequent repetition of foods. Nearly every lunch and dinner includes wheat bread and either rice or potatoes. Nearly every breakfast includes a square muffin cut from a sheet pan.

Inmates described a particular sense of monotony about the cake served five to seven days a week. Unfrosted and brownish-yellow, it bears a strong resemblance to the morning muffins.

“Always cake,” one inmate said.

“I’m not asking to eat like a king,” said Davis.

Some said they are just asking to eat like adults.

“We only get four chicken nuggets,” Rodriguez said. “We’re grown men. … Our kids wouldn't be able to eat that.”

THE COMMISSARY

Unappealing cafeteria food puts products from the commissary in high demand.

Inmates in the Dartmouth jail can place their orders once a week from a printed price list. They pay using personal accounts funded by themselves or their families. It’s not unusual to run out of cash.

“If you don’t make canteen, you’re hungry,” inmate Devin Salvucci said. “By the end of the night, you’re going to bed hungry.”

Orders get delivered to a garage outside the main jail, in clear plastic bags, each with a printout of the order affixed to the top. Employees use wheeled carts to distribute orders to the inmates.

Inmates can buy a limited number of non-food products, such as white sneakers and small bottles of name-brand shampoo.

Most food products available through the commissary are convenience foods. Packaged honey buns and corn chips are popular. One inmate’s recent order contained 30 blocks of ramen — half chili-flavored and half spicy vegetable.

Massachusetts tracks commissary spending at the state-run prisons, and inmates spend hundreds of thousands a year on ramen at 40 cents per pack. The Bristol County jails charge 90 cents.

Much has been written about ramen consumption in prisons, including the 2015 cookbook, “Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars,” which offers instruction on how to doctor ramen with everything from meat to orange-flavored punch to pork rinds.

In 2016, a study of prison life made headlines around the world when a University of Arizona sociologist, Michael Gibson-Light, found that ramen was so important in one southern U.S. state prison, it was replacing cigarettes as an underground currency.

Driving the switch was the jail’s practice of cutting the quality and quantity of food, which shifted the cost of filling bellies — via the commissary — to inmates and their families.

Staff and prisoners, whose identity and location were concealed in the published report, told Gibson-Light that the food had declined in quality and quantity over the past few decades.

Wakefield, the Rutgers professor, said that in her work in state prison, where prisoners spend more time than the average six months Hodgson says inmates spend in his facilities, longer-term prisoners remember a time before many prisons used food-service contractors. The kitchens tended to be “sort of inmate-run,” and prisoners generally say food quality has declined since the switch.

“For me, the food should not be the punishment. And certainly being in jail is punishment enough,” she said.

When inmates need money for the commissary, they can resort to illegal practices to get it, said José Ashford, a criminologist and professor of social work at the University of Arizona.

In his experience in more than 30 years in Arizona, he has seen a prison gang extract “taxes” from other inmates to fatten its members’ food accounts. A gang can also exploit inmates who have money on their own food accounts, he said.

Arizona’s controversial Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who was voted out of office in 2016, replaced all meats with soy protein and fed inmates only twice a day — likely another boon for the commissary.

“The amount of profit they must make is amazing,” Ashford said, especially with prices higher than on the outside.

Bristol County contracts with Keefe Commissary Network for its commissary. For that privilege, Keefe is required to pay the sheriff’s office 33 percent of adjusted gross sales. The contract sets a minimum payment of $33,075 per month.

Hodgson has said any profit goes to inmate programs.

FOOD AS PUNISHMENT

In January, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office addressed food complaints on Twitter, tweeting a photo of “O”-shaped cereal, a small carton of milk, and a square muffin.

“Seen Around Dartmouth Jail: Tuesday morning’s breakfast,” the tweet said. “If you’re more of a bacon and eggs type, don’t break the law and you can have whatever breakfast you want, every morning.”

Ashford said food-as-punishment is used for publicity more often these days. What the public sometimes doesn’t realize, he said, is that in county jails, many of the inmates are being held while they await trial — that is, they should be presumed innocent. Many would be out on bail if they could afford it.

“So you’re punishing them for poverty,” he said.

Susan Krumholz, a crime and justice professor at UMass Dartmouth, said public perception of jail is based on misleading information.

“An awful lot of people who are in jails are there for doing things that most of us have done. Often what they’ve done is just really stupid,” she said.

When she was practicing law, many of her clients were sentenced for the same offenses for which her white, upper-middle-class friends got off in the 1960s and 70s: shoplifting, driving under the influence, possession of drugs, dealing drugs, joy-riding and simple assaults.

And once people come to the attention of the system, they are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement, she said. “It is a difficult maze to escape.”

Sentences top out at 2.5 years in county jail. Some crimes are more serious than others.

Gregg Miliote, a spokesman for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, said county jail typically houses people convicted of driving under the influence, indecent assault, first-time convictions for drug dealing or illegal gun possession, vehicle crashes resulting in bodily injury, and lesser domestic violence cases.

Krumholz teaches in the Dartmouth jail as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which professors teach semester-long courses to mixed groups of inmates and college students. She said she has eaten prison meals in numerous institutions where she trained for her work, and the food is “typically pretty awful.”

Continually unappetizing food can make inmates depressed.

“I know it makes them angry,” she said.

Perhaps contrary to perception, Hodgson said he does not support punishing inmates by reducing the amount of food they receive, nor the quality of the food.

“I don’t believe you use food to send a message to be tough on crime,” he said. “I think what you do is ... you meet your basic standards of nutrition.”

He did reduce portions in 2006, saying it was better for the inmates’ health and less expensive. He and the staff nutritionist went over the menu and cut anything above the basic nutrition inmates needed to stay healthy, he said at the time.

But penalizing inmates by altering their meals is not unheard of.

Witness the infamous American jail food “nutraloaf,” a typically house-made amalgamation of foods served as punishment for bad behavior. It’s a nutritionally balanced meal in a meatloaf-like shape.

The Bristol County recipe for nutraloaf includes dry milk, vegetables, beef, mashed beans, egg and bread.

Spokesmen for the sheriffs in Bristol and Plymouth said they reserve nutraloaf for a narrow set of situations, and it has not been served in several years.

In Bristol County, inmates get nutraloaf if they throw food multiple times, Darling said.

In Plymouth, inmates get nutraloaf — the so-called “alternative meal” — only if they use food, excrement or personal items as a weapon, Birtwell said. If a staff member requests an alternative meal for an inmate, the decision must be approved by three people: the superintendent, dietician and physician.

If approved, the alternative meal may be nutraloaf or something else, he said.

The last time Plymouth served an alternative meal was in July of 2015, according to Birtwell.

No matter what they eat, most inmates are locked up for social problems that should have been addressed earlier, Krumholz said. And they don’t have good job skills to help them stay out of jail.

“We would agree with that,” said Hodgson. The jail offers adult basic education, computer literacy, civics and a career-readiness course to help inmates apply for jobs. It also has a drug treatment program.

He said he would love to offer more, but the state would have to fund it.

When it comes to food, there’s nothing “extra.”

“It’s not home cookin’. This is jail,” he said. “You’re not going to get extra.”

“You know, the taxpayers are paying for it,” Hodgson said. “Provided we’re meeting your nutritional standards and keeping you as healthy as we possibly can, which we do, that’s the only standard I’m worried about.”