PRISONERS VOTE NO TO PORRIDGE
Lags bin 200-year-old breakfast
DOING porridge every day has sent prisoners in one jail completely stir crazy.
So they’ve voted to can the breakfast meal that has been a daily staple for British lags for two centuries.
Convicts at a Category C nick – allowed a “prison council” by the governor – have voted to take it off the menu at weekends as a “treat”.
Instead they’ll have the choice of a fry-up, omelettes, crackers and jam or cereal.
It’s a decision that would surely have got the thumbs-up from Ronnie Barker’s famous lag Fletch in 1970s TV hit Porridge – slang for doing time.
The move at HMP Holme House, in Teesside, comes 200 years since it was first served up at Inveraray Jail, in Scotland, which opened in 1820. Records show inmates started each day with five ounces of oatmeal and three quarters of a pint of milk. Porridge is still regarded as a good way to feed Britain’s 80,000 prisoners on a £2 a day per head budget.
It’s renowned for its health benefits, giving a slowrelease of energy as well as magnesium, iron, zinc and B vitamins.
But the cheap and filling meal’s regularity has become gruelling for jailbirds over the years. A book called Lag’s Lexicon, published in 1950, first recorded the phrase “doing porridge” as slang among prisoners for their sentence.
And in 1974 it inspired the classic BBC sitcom following the antics of Norman Stanley Fletcher in fictional Slade jail, which ran for three years.
The switch away from porridge at HMP Holme House emerged in a report by jail watchdog the Independent Monitoring Board.
A source added: “It has gone down a treat.”