An obese Arkansas jail inmate awaiting trial for capital murder is alleging an unusual injury in a prisoner rights suit –- jail meals are so low in calories that he has lost more than 100 pounds in eight months.

“If we are given enough callories [sic] a day we should maintain our body weight,” Broderick Laswell says in a pro se complaint.

At the time he was jailed in September for beating and stabbing a man to death, Laswell weighed 413 pounds. On the Benton County jail's 3,000 calorie-a-day diet, he has shrivelled all the way down to a svelte 308 pounds, losing an average of a pound a day.

“This is not healthy at all,” he protests. “The only reason we lose weight in here is because we are litterrally [sic] being starved to death.”

As a federal appeals court has noted, “[T]he Eighth Amendment can be violated by subjecting a prisoner to dietary conditions likely to be injurious to his health.” Berryman v. Johnson, 940 F.2d 658 (1991).

In a case involving the Arkansas state prison system, inmates complained about a diet of “grue” providing less than 1,000 calories a day. The U.S. Supreme Court in Hutto v. Finney, 437 U.S. 678 (1978), affirmed a trial judge who discontinued the diet.

“If an inmate is staying here over a long period of time his or health decreses [sic] they turn into skin and bones,” Laswell alleges. “This is cruel and unusuall [sic] punishment.”

But 3,000 calories a day is considered a typical Western diet and Laswell is stretching Eighth Amendment protections beyond their rational limits by arguing that his weight loss is an injury rather than, given his obesity, a positive boon to his health.

If, on the other hand, jail officials did feed him enough to maintain his weight, they could be exposed to liability for any obesity-related health problems. In a Missouri case, the widow of an inmate sued the state prison system for failing to insure that he followed the diet prescribed to control his obesity.

By Matthew Heller
4/29/08