Ramadan in Prison.

I am not a Muslim man so I do not celebrate Ramadan. However! I doooo have a Ramadan story. As the title shows, it happened one year while I was in prison. That’s always a fun beginning to any story right? Here’s some backstory first…

In prison they feed you the bare minimum. And by bare minimum, I mean if the daily recommended calorie intake is 2,000, don’t expect more. That 2000 calories INCLUDES all salt, pepper, and sugar packets. It includes all condiments, the scoop of butter, ketchup, and mustard. So, if you don’t eat literally everything that is offered you are gonna fall way short of that daily recommended. Don’t like salt? Too bad, otherwise you waste away. You do get three meals a day but dinner is served at 4:30pm and breakfast isn’t served until 6am the next day. Those hours in between can be rough, especially if you don’t have commissary. Usually you have a cellmate and hopefully he isn’t broke at the same time you are lol. This way you can get a soup (package of ramen) from your cellmate and pay them back later. I didn’t have a cellmate however because I was in the hole. The hole, solitary confinement, and I didn’t have a cellmate. I was in there solo dolo.

I’m starving in there and I was noticing that some of the other inmates were getting a bag lunch brought to them around 8pm. So I yelled out my cell to them “Why are y’all getting them sack lunches?”

“Ramadan!” yelled back someone I couldn’t see.

“Yeah! Just say you’re Muslim! They bring you extra food! said another guy in the pod I couldn’t see.

So these guys were getting all three meals plus an extra meal! The prison can’t question your faith because thaaat’s racist. So even if you just decided right then and there to become a new Muslim, they have to honor it. And I was in there starving like everyone, so I did like everyone else, and said I was Muslim so I could get the extra food too. That just goes to show you the level of desperation in prison. In reality it’s truly blasphemous to fake the funk on a holy celebration of a religion. We were just trying to survive. Those lunches were LIFE! It wouldn’t be nothing but a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a small bag of chips. However, when your stomach is eating itself it may have well been a steak dinner looking so good!

Ramadan is one of the holiest months of the Islamic faith. The name “Ramadan” is actually the name of the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It was during this month that the Prophet Muhammed had some of the first verses of the Quranfa revealed to him. For Ramadan, Muslims around the world practice fasting. Muslims will have one meal before sunrise and then fast until after sunset.

That would mean missing lunch and dinner if someone was really practicing the faith strictly. That would also likely mean death because that would be crazy. You’d wither away! You would think to just go to lunch and dinner and bring the food back to your cell right? That’s not allowed though. Something like that could get you sent to the hole. That’s the circle. So that was the hustle of the other inmates who had already been locked up longer than me and were SURVIVING. You know, I am not proud of this but that was just what I had to do to survive. Imagine being so hungry! Having “water sandwiches”. That’s where you just drink a lot of water until your stomach feels like you ate a sandwich. That’s real life. I lived that. That’s how the state takes care of you. That’s why you gotta work hard and fight to never be in the states crosshairs. Follow laws. Follow rules. Live your life! Stay away from them people.

Ramadan in prison man. Where you gotta lie to get extra food and its STILL doesn’t equal how much food you’re actually supposed to have. We just used it as a way to get extra food for a month. May God forgive me. I am a survivor.