Florida prisons struggling with extra costs of a hearty appetite for religion

This new New York Times article, headlined "You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love a Kosher," highlights the extra costs of respecting religious freedoms for the incarcerated. Here are excerpts:

Florida is now under a court order to begin serving kosher food to eligible inmates, a routine and court-tested practice in most states.  But state prison officials expressed alarm recently over the surge in prisoners, many of them gentiles, who have stated an interest in going kosher.

Their concern: The cost of religious meals is four times as much as the standard fare, said Michael D. Crews, who is expected to be confirmed as secretary of the Department of Corrections in March.  “The last number I saw Monday was 4,417,” Mr. Crews said of inmate requests at his recent confirmation hearing before a State Senate committee. “Once they start having the meals, we could see the number balloon.”...

Kosher food in prisons has long served as fodder for lawsuits around the country, with most courts coming down firmly on the side of inmates.  As long as inmates say they hold a sincere belief in Judaism — a deeply forgiving standard — they are entitled to kosher meals, even if takes a little chutzpah to make the request.

“Florida is an outlier,” said Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has represented inmates around the country.  “It’s a holdout. I don’t know why it’s being a holdout.  It is strange that Florida, of all places, is placing a special burden on Jewish inmates.  It’s just stubbornness.”

In Florida’s prison system. which faces a $58 million deficit, money is the easy answer for the battle against kosher food.  The cost of three kosher meals in Florida is $7 a day, a big jump from the $1.54 for standard meals, Mr. Crews said.  In New York State, where 1,500 inmates out of about 56,000 keep kosher, the cost of a kosher meal is $5 a person.  In California, where some prisons have kosher kitchens, the price tag is $8, and the meals are served to 0.7 percent of about 120,000 inmates.

Last April, facing an inmate lawsuit, Florida began a pilot program for the religious diet at Union Correctional Facility near Jacksonville. Initially, some 250 inmates signed up, Mr. Crews said. But once other inmates spied the individually boxed lunches, 863 expressed a sudden interest in keeping kosher....

But the question of who gets a kosher meal is tricky.  In all, less than 1.5 percent of the country’s 1.9 million inmates are Jewish, according to the Aleph Institute, a social services organization, and many do not even request kosher meals.  “Who is a Jew?” Mr. Rassbach said. “People disagree about who is a Jew.”

The courts steer clear of that perilous debate.  Instead, inmates need only say they have a “sincerely held” religious belief.  Attempts by prison officials and rabbis to quiz prisoners about the Torah and the rules of keeping kosher were ruled not kosher. Tracing maternal lineage was similarly viewed unfavorably....  Some states, like New York, do nothing to try to discern who is feigning Jewishness.  In California, inmates talk with a rabbi who will gauge, very generally, a prisoner’s actual interest.

But some Jewish groups in Florida are pushing for greater control, which may pose a difficult legal hurdle.  “There should be away to ascertain who really does require a kosher meal for their religious belief,” said Rabbi Menachem M. Katz, director of prison and military outreach for the Aleph Institute in South Florida, “and who is just gaming the system.”