Residents Near A Prison Can Hear The Screams Of Starving Inmates, But Are They Really Starving?

Residents who live in homes near a prison have recorded the sounds of screaming prisoners begging for help, saying they’re starving. And if you think this is happening in a third-world prison in a place like Guatemala or Iraq, you’d be wrong: it’s happening in Pennsylvania.

As The Free Though Project reports, residents near the Lancaster County prison can hear the screams of prisoners from their homes. Screaming that they’re starving, and being “treated like animals,” some residents have recorded the disturbing cries.

A camera crew from TV station WGAL (Lancaster) was also able to capture the sounds of screaming prisoners.

Whether or not the prisoners inside the Lancaster County Prison are actually starving, or are simply upset over minor changes to their diet – changes that include scaling back “luxuries” such as cheese on their sandwiches – depends largely on whom you ask.

Lancaster County Commissioner Scott Martin, who also serves as chairman of the prison board, said in remarks via Lancaster Online that the prisoners whose screams could be heard were merely upset about their sandwiches. Specifically, they no longer have cheese on them, and they got two 1.5-ounce meat slices instead of one 3-ounce slice. He also said that claims of starvation were “overblown” by prisoners who were trying to “stir the pot.”

“I don’t know why they have expectations of cake and steak in prison. If you don’t like the diet, don’t come to prison.”

And the prison has a plan for dealing with the prisoners who complain about starvation by screaming through the windows: they’ll close the windows of prisoners who complain.

Jean Bickmire, president of Have a Heart for Persons in the Criminal Justice System, isn’t on board with that idea, saying that closing the windows could be dangerous for the inmates in the poorly-ventilated prison, especially with summer coming.

Prisons throughout the country, forced with swelling populations of inmates and simultaneously shrinking budgets, have had to tighten the purse strings, and often the first thing to get cut is the food budget. In fact, according to this Inquisitr report, the Fairfield City Jail in Alabama simply ran out of money for food and did the only thing they could do: they released all of the prisoners.

Bickmire confirmed that her organization would be looking into the allegations that prisoners at the Lancaster County Prison are being starved.

[Image courtesy of: Shutterstock/tiverlucky]