2005-01-23 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- In the sour innards of Men's Central Jail, Alice Scott watched with pride as trays of her chicken casserole dinner were delivered like mail through slots in the cell doors. Prisoners began devouring the fare as soon as they had it in their grasp.

"The inmates like the food, and that makes me happy," said Scott, a sheriff's lieutenant who oversees meal preparations for the jail.

Then came the reviews.

"It stinks," said Bobby Love, 46, jailed for a probation violation. Like his five cellmates, he spooned up the casserole, carrots and green beans while standing in the elbow-bumping space between metal bunks. "The food's always cold and the milk is hot."

Similar comments sounded up and down the cell tiers, the critics shirtless and tattooed, creating a boiler-room din: "Garbage!" "Disgusting!" "Give us steak!"

Decent chow is considered as crucial as tall walls to the orderly management of jails and prisons. Churning it out is often an assembly-line, security-obsessed and penny-pinching task that depends on inmate workers who might prove better at stealing food than cooking it.

And the quality and quantity of grub can mean the difference between peace and violence in the cellblocks, where prisoners long for the sirloins and sundaes that vanished with their freedom.

But even food that isn't bad enough to trigger a revolt is routinely described as revolting.

At Men's Central, the shouted protests covered the range of the jail's cuisine, although the chicken patties got a few thumbs-up.

"The burritos are pretty good, too," said DeMarcus Smith, 19, of Los Angeles, another probation offender. "But I don't even know what it was, what we had yesterday."

Scott said it was a tamale casserole. She appeared only slightly annoyed by the carping from the pens, her weary expression suggesting that it came with the territory.

"Typical," she said.

It used to be worse, here and elsewhere. Over the decades, legal reforms have improved the nation's detention menus, doing away with daily rations of gruel-ish, artery-clogging concoctions. But many institutions spend less than $3 per inmate per day on meals.

Complaints about food have fueled numerous disturbances behind bars, minor and major. Spaghetti sparked a nonfatal uprising at the federal prison on Alcatraz Island, which closed in 1963 and is now a National Park Service attraction.

Meals were also a factor in America's deadliest inmate riot, the 1971 rebellion that took 43 lives at New York's Attica prison.

Today, inmates are guaranteed a healthy allotment of calories and nutrients, as well as clean kitchens. Diets low in salt and fat have gained favor. More and more prisons are eliminating pork in deference to the religious tenets of Muslim prisoners.

Some cling to an old tactic of pumping up the calories -- serving 3,500 to 3,800 a day, instead of the standard 2,500 to 3,000 -- to keep inmates full-bellied and calm, said Dan Jameson, a senior vice president of Aramark Corp., a food vendor that provides meals for 425 prisons and jails.

"It's using food to manage the prison," Jameson said.

Inmate rights advocates condemn as dehumanizing what they say is the growing practice of requiring inmates to eat in their cells, a measure taken to prevent fights in dining halls.

Cost-cutting is another sore subject for the advocates, who say leaner budgets have led to fewer hot meals, smaller portions and more palate-numbing packaged food.

"Most of us would find prison meals bland, unappealing and monotonous," said Steve Fama, an attorney for the San Rafael-based Prison Law Office, which represents inmates. "Especially the bag lunch. ... It has something that has similarities to what people would call lunch meat. I'm not sure it is lunch meat."

Corey Weinstein, a physician and investigator for California Prison Focus, an inmate rights group in San Francisco, said jails and prisons balk at accommodating the dietary needs of diabetic inmates or those with food allergies.

"It's ridiculous," he said. "That's why there are riots."

The nastiest of the nasty, Weinstein added, is the food in county jails. "Notoriously horrible," he said. "Lots of hot dogs and beans."

Not true, said Scott, who runs meal service for 17,500 inmates in the county's lockups, the largest single feeding ground in American corrections. She insists meal time can be the best time of doing time.

"We're using Army-Navy recipe cards," Scott said, walking through the sprawling, clanging kitchen at the Twin Towers Jail.

She said dietitians approve the low-fat and low-salt recipes, and the kitchen prepares 1,200 special meals on the average day for inmates with medical problems.

But it also doles out a "disciplinary loaf" to unruly prisoners: An entire meal is molded into a baked log that is nutritious but unpleasant.

"We only do about 10 a day," said Scott.

Her inmate crew stirred 100-gallon kettles of carrots and beans with paddles big enough to row a boat. Although it was late morning, the vegetables were for dinner, the jail's only hot meal. Cooking for thousands dictates an early start. Dinners are stored for hours in insulated containers before they are served. Scott said the food is kept free of illness-causing bacteria.

As she toured the kitchen, steam from the kettles and pot washers rained puddles on the floor. The 50 or so workers, dressed in smeared white uniforms, had volunteered for the duty in exchange for double helpings of the jail food, plus leftovers from the officers' cafeteria, whose dishes are far more varied and appetizing.

"I like the barbecued ribs," inmate Karen Hawkes, 43, said of the cafeteria's treats.

Hawkes and her co-workers toiled under the wary eyes of a dozen staff cooks and sheriff's guards. Carving knives were tethered to cutting tables with padlocked cables, just in case.

Years ago, Scott said, an inmate in another jail kitchen grabbed a loose knife and briefly took a cook hostage. She could recall no serious incidents of violence in the Twin Towers kitchen, or escapes from it.

"Our biggest security problem is pruno," she said, referring to an alcoholic drink prisoners make. They steal or hoard enough fruit to produce gallons of the potion each day, fermenting it in plastic bags.

"That's why we put holes in the bags," said Scott, displaying a plastic lunch sack. "These have six holes, and I've asked for six more."

The bag held two pieces of tired-looking processed turkey, two slices of wheat bread, two cookies, an apple and carrots. It is a typical lunch. Breakfast is mainly bran flakes and milk, hard-boiled eggs, a bun, jelly and fruit juice.

The jail stopped serving hot oatmeal last year to trim $1.5 million from its annual food budget, which is $22.9 million -- or $2.25 per day per inmate, less than that of California's state prisons ($2.45) and federal penitentiaries ($2.78).

Several women said they would starve if it weren't for the jail commissary, where inmates can buy noodles, soup, stew, chips, candy and the like -- if they have the money.

Cleveland Jones isn't moving anywhere, and he's tortured by thoughts of food. Jones, 28, is doing 217 years to life for attempted murder and other crimes, leaving him eligible for parole in 2204. He's at New Folsom, a modern California state prison next to the 19th century stone fortress that inspired Johnny Cash's tune.

He spoke while crouching on the cell floor, so that he could peer through a thigh-high tray slot in the steel door. Inmates at maximum-security New Folsom are released from their cells for exercise just two hours every other day, unless they have a prison job.

"Wishing is a dream," Jones said of his food fantasies. He shrugged in a gesture of futility. "Steak? Lobster?"

In the kitchen, inmate laborers washed the remains of instant mashed potatoes from bathtub-size kettles. Pans of the potatoes were stocked in walk- in "quick chill" refrigerators.

Quick chilling allows the prison to start meals two days in advance. The food is cooked, then "blast cooled" in the refrigerators to within a few degrees of freezing. On serving day, it is reheated.

New Folsom places meal samples in a locker labeled the "Dead Man's Tray." They are kept 72 hours for inspection in the event of an outbreak of food poisoning.

"We've never had an incidence of food poisoning," said Jeff Ridge, the prison's assistant food manager. "You'll have three or four inmates say, 'Oh, the food made me sick.' But then they'll go to the doctor, and he'll say, 'I don't think so.' "

Ridge loped through the humid kitchen to a small office, where he and cook supervisor Frank Coleman discussed thievery. They told of the ways inmate workers steal food to cook in their cells, sometimes with illicit candles crafted from purloined shortening.

"Two weeks ago, I fired two workers for putting 10 pounds of chicken, turkey, cheese and onions in a salad box," said Coleman. "They were going to make burritos."

The workers also steal from the trays of fellow prisoners, Ridge said. "They'll pick out all the meat from the beef stew," he said.

Prisoners caught stealing lose their jobs, which pay $20 to $50 a month. Inmates in disciplinary isolation are given paper trays, because the rigid plastic ones could be used as a weapon, Ridge said.

On this day the entree was chili colorado. The prisoner workers filled the trays in the kitchen and carried them to the two-man cells.

"It's basically slop," said Jonathan Hurth, 32, of Los Angeles, who is serving 25 years to life on a three-strikes burglary conviction. He grew wistful. "It'd be nice to just order something."