Program slashes inmate food costs.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

STATE RANKING A 2004 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics looked at state spending for prisons, including how much states spend daily per inmate on food service. The study was for 2001, the most recent year for such data. Here's how Oregon fit in, along with the U.S. average.

1: North Carolina, $0.52 2: Alabama, $0.72 3: Mississippi, $0.81 12: Oregon, $1.82 48: Maine, $5.03 49: Washington, $5.68 50: Pennsylvania, $5.69 U.S. average: $2.62

SALEM - 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 the savings ends up helping state government's bottom line.

Prison officials consider the program a real success story. Since Monem traded his gig with a major commercial food vendor for one with the Oregon Department of Corrections, the state has seen its costs drop from $3.95 per inmate meal 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 Oregon Department of Corrections along with several county jails.

Monem said contracts with state prison systems always cost more than local jails for the simple reason that it is cheaper to feed people in jails than in prisons.

Most jailed inmates are likely to be there for days, weeks or months, not years. So they're more likely to put up with low-grade food than are state prisoners, who will be eating penitentiary chow for years or even a lifetime to come - and likely to protest a steady flow of mystery meat and grayish vegetables, thus making trouble for the staff or doing damage to prison property. In addition, state inmates are required to work, so their daily caloric requirements are often one-third higher than their sedentary jailhouse counterparts.

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 says it stacks up well against any 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 tucks into 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 - as well as a prized work assignment for a half-dozen inmates at a time.

Wholesale advantages

But in the larger scheme, the fresh carrots and radishes make up just a fraction of the nearly 30 million meals served in a year in its 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, which came with forklifts, bright yellow shelving, truck ramps and some of WinCo's old refrigeration equipment used to chill perishables.

But the Legislature's approval of the acquisition came 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. Thanks to his private-industry connections and his unique position in the public sector, Monem can track down great deals he said weren't possible for the state when he serviced it as a contractor.

If a food maker were to sell that food to a commercial food-service company, he said, it would never pass the savings on to its client, be it a prison system, university or stadium - such savings would be kept as profit, Monem said.

He routinely scores savings that would cause a coupon-clipper to salivate. On Tuesday, he nailed down a bargain on frozen french fries: 12 cents a pound for 35 tons from an Idaho producer that its 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 just ample 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.

Without its warehouse complex, the Department of Corrections couldn't nab such deals, since all the savings would be eclipsed by the cost of dividing up the food and trucking it to each state prison, from the Idaho border town of Ontario to the coastal city of North Bend.

"If they had to take it to 14 locations, the company wouldn't sell it to me," he said. "It would be cheaper for them to dump it, so this place gives me the ability to get these kind of savings."

Saxton weighs in

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 last week 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, explaining that he thinks enough savings are available to hire back an unspecified number of state police officers who have been laid off in recent years. Meanwhile, his main opponent, Gov. Ted Kulongoski, floated the idea last week of adding a surcharge to auto insurance to pay for additional state troopers.

Saxton's spokeswoman, Angela Wilhelms, said when the candidate talks about counties spending half what the state does to feed inmates, he's actually comparing the costs of two counties to the state.

One is Washington County, where a switch from government-run to contractor-provided food service cut costs by about one-third, said Sgt. Todd Iverson, who oversees the program.

The contract leaves the county paying between 83 cents and 89 cents per meal. Iverson cited two big reasons for the savings: inmate and private-worker labor has replaced much of the work, which had been done by county employees. Another: nearly 90 percent of the meat in inmates' meals is ground turkey, which is cheaper than other types such as beef or chicken.

Iverson said there hasn't been much of a downside to going with a contractor, outside of the logistics of making the switch a couple years ago.

Other counties with private contractors handling food service are Deschutes and Multnomah, which made the switch in 1983 to save money. Many counties continue to use their own employees, along with inmates, to put food on the prisoners' meal trays. Clackamas is one; Lane is another.

Liz Burrows, a Lane County manager whose duties include food service, said the county spends about $1.70 per inmate meal. It has stuck with running its own food service partly because it wants more control over the quality and type of food served.

On Monday, Lane County jail inmates on standard meal plans were served coffee cake, eggs, farina, milk and fruit for breakfast; bologna sandwiches, split-pea soup, crackers, cookies and Kool-aid for lunch; and for dinner they got fish sticks and tartar sauce, scallop potatoes, coleslaw, a dinner roll, milk and ice cream.

She said private-contract food service is "our big brother."

"That's always sitting over our heads."