Poor quality prison food is often experienced by incarcerated eaters as part of an inhumane treatment with far reaching consequences for their psychological and physical health. Consequently, scholarship has shown how prison foodways can be experienced as a punitive and intrusive form of control over the imprisoned person’s body. However, prison foodways that align the physical, social and cultural needs of imprisoned persons, tend to have the opposite effect on their prison experiences.
Therefore, Oudenaarde prison introduced a program in which some imprisoned persons order and receive their cooking ingredients as well as the cooking facilities to prepare their own meals.
In this workshop, we inform the audience about the way in which this approach to food preparation and consumption can be considered as a powerful tool to increase feelings of autonomy, respect, self-care, tastes and memories of home, and connections with others through commensality. We will invite a variety of speakers to inform us about this program and their experiences. The speakers are: an imprisoned person who participates in the project, a prison governor involved in the program and an academic.
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Hans Claus
Director, Prison of Oudenaarde, Belgium
Hans Claus was born an artist: he is a poet, sculptor, painter and photographer. He fulfills his social role as a criminologist (1984) and as a prison director (from 1986 to the present). He is currently the director of the Oudenaarde prison. In 2010, the director and artist collaborated in the creation of a new prison concept: the (small-scale and socially anchored) detention house. As founder of vzw de Huizen (www.dehuizen.be) and, the international movement RESCALED (www.rescaled.org) he pursues the realization of this concept. As about the prison concept, in recent years he made groups of people think about society which, like the prisons it houses, is trapped in old and outdated patterns. In this way, he initiated the Declaration of November 30, 2019 with six outlines for a livable world (www.novemberverklaring.eu).
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An-Sofie Vanhouche
Professor, VUB, Belgium
An-Sofie Vanhouche holds a PhD in Criminology and works as assistant professor in the Criminology Department. She obtained her Master's degree in 2011 with a thesis entitled: “Innocently imprisoned: The Consequences for People who are Acquitted after Being Remanded in Custody”. In 2017, she successfully defended her PhD, 'Prison Cuisines in Europe. A Comparative Study of Prison Food Systems in Belgium, Tilburg and Denmark', jointly supervised at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the University of Southern Denmark. An-Sofie currently teaches several courses as assistant professor on penology and comparative criminology. Her main research interest lies in the lived experience of imprisonment, participatory research, prison foodways, prison education, and comparative penology.
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Karim Huybrechts
Ervaringsdeskundige, Prison of Oudenaarde, Belgium
Karim Huybrechts is inmate in the prison of Oudenaarde. He is responsible for the Library since many years. He initially raised the question to get the opportunity to cook meals for himself instead of being served by the industrial kitchen of the prison. He was involved vividly in the workgroup that arranged the details of the project to involve a group of prisoners having the same desire. He consequently managed to realise his dream.
