Bargain shopper's aim: low-cost prison food

SALEM, Ore. — If a food manufacturer is looking to dump five truckloads of kiddie cereal because S-E-X appears in a word-search game on the back of the boxes, Fred Monem will find out.

Monem is the Oregon Department of Corrections' secret weapon in the fight to cut down the cost of feeding its 13,000 prisoners. Like a frenetic Chicago commodities trader, the department's food-service administrator is up by 4 a.m., working the phones and shaking down his sources to find the biggest bargains on the wholesale food market.

And every time he scores name-brand cereal for 62 cents a box instead of the $3.25 standard wholesale rate, the food winds up on inmates' tables and the savings ends up helping state government's bottom line.

Since Monem traded his gig with a major commercial food vendor for one with the Corrections Department, the state has seen its costs drop from $3.95 per day per inmate in 1997 to $2.38.

Only 11 states feed their prisoners more cheaply than Oregon does, according to a U.S. Department of Justice study.

While prison officials are proud of their cost-cutting efforts, it's become a part of this year's governor's race debate over whether government services — including the feeding of inmates — could be delivered more cost-effectively by contracting out to private vendors. Monem said he is very familiar with the pros and cons.

For years, he was a manager with Food Service America, a now-defunct corporation for which he oversaw food-service contracts with institutional clients in five states. At one time that included the Corrections Department along with several county jails.

Oregon State Penitentiary minimum-security inmate Jeff Kahle said the food isn't something he'd compare with what you'd eat at a restaurant. But he says it stacks up well against other institutional food — including from school cafeterias and other prisons at which he's done time.

"It's better than any place I've ever been," said Kahle, who's from Eugene and is serving a sentence for identity theft.

Kahle's brief dining review comes between bites as he eats from a tray of vegetarian food — rice and cooked pinto beans, salad, chunks of broccoli, spears of cucumbers and slices of peppers.

For now, the late-summer harvest is producing an abundance of fresh melons and vegetables for inmates in the Salem prisons. But the fresh carrots and radishes make up just a fraction of the nearly 30 million meals served in a year in Oregon's 14 prisons.

The real source of the tons of food that feeds inmates is a few hundred yards east of the penitentiary: supermarket-chain WinCo's old distribution center, which the Oregon Department of Corrections bought in 1996.

Sold on the idea that it could equip the prison system to buy huge quantities of goods at cut-rate costs and store them for months at a time, the Legislature approved the acquisition, with a condition: The department would have to come up with the money to operate the warehouse from within its own budget.

"They said, if you guys are going to save all this money, then take the savings from here and run the place," Monem said.

Since then, he's been wheeling and dealing for the best prices on food that's ordered by the ton or the truckload.

He routinely scores savings that would cause a coupon-clipper to salivate. On a recent Tuesday, he nailed down a bargain on frozen French fries: 12 cents a pound for 35 tons that fast-food buyers rejected as discolored; normally, such food would go for 56 cents a pound. The savings to the state: $30,800.

The vast warehouse freezer provides more than enough room to stash the frozen fries that weren't on anyone's shopping list; it also gives the state prison system a central location where the food companies' trucks can back up and unload.

Despite its drop in spending — which comes to $5.5 million a year compared with the 1997 spending level — the state's inmate-food program has become a topic of derision by the Republican nominee for governor, Ron Saxton.

For several months, the Portland attorney has railed against the program as an example of a state government that refuses to innovate and look to the private sector as a means of harnessing the marketplace's drive to maximize efficiency and cut costs.

Asked how he would pay for additional state troopers, Saxton brought up inmate meal costs.

"The state still spends over twice as much per prisoner, per meal, to feed the prisoners as the counties do in their jails," he told reporters.

Meanwhile, his main opponent, Gov. Ted Kulongoski, floated the idea of adding a surcharge to auto insurance to pay for additional state troopers.