From Microwaved Meals to Short Calls Home: What Thanksgiving Looks Like Behind Bars

For many, the holidays are an emotionally fraught time: for those with strained family relationships, for those who suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, and for those who are in prison.

“There’s a somber mood,” Michael Cantrell, a retired corrections officer who worked for the Missouri State Penitentiary and Federal Bureau of Prisons, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It’s just quiet. Almost eerie. If you work in a [men’s] prison, there’s always a roar of men’s voices in the background—except on the holidays.”

On Thanksgiving Day, prisons often serve holiday meals to their population. But the fact that prison food is so unappetizing makes the gesture towards a “Thanksgiving meal” worse, says Henry Dillard, who was incarcerated from 1995 to 2000.

“It feels like a slap in the face,” Dillard tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “You get this plastic tray, with a scoop of dressing, a slice of manufactured turkey, some gravy, something fruit-adjacent and a couple of slices of bread. It would’ve been easier if they just gave us the normal stuff.” 

As an alternative, Dillard says a lot of incarcerated people band together and make their own meals. At the Parnall Correctional Facility in Jackson, Mich., where Dillard spent the last five years of his sentence, that meant getting together in the day room and using the microwave to cook up a meal, often at “the crack of dawn” to avoid the bottleneck of others who want to use the microwave. 

Cooking up the meal was a multi-step process, Dillard says.

“Maybe I’ve got a friend working in the kitchen who can get us an onion and a bell pepper,” he continues. Those veggies would be microwaved along with chopped up sausage, “maybe 20 Ramen noodles,” refried beans, rice and cheese purchased from commissary. All of it would be layered into a casserole served on a cardboard platter and wrapped in a garbage bag that kept the food warm and facilitated easier cleanup.

“We’d do it every holiday occasion,” Dillard says. “But especially Thanksgiving. Because that’s when you cook and eat and break bread with your people.”

Other incarcerated people retreat into themselves on the holidays. That’s what Reggie Chatman did while incarcerated from 1998 to 2022.

Chatman, who now works for a nonprofit called The Fortune Society, says that during his first Thanksgiving at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., he was excited to partake in a meal similar to the one Dillard described. Nineteen years old and barely two months into his lengthy sentence, Chatman felt mounting joy as he received ingredients by post from his family and then cooked with other incarcerated individuals. But once the meal was over and his belly was full, the reality of Chatman’s imprisonment hit him in a profoundly new way.

“This wave of loneliness came over me. That was the first time I recognized the depth of my situation: that I would be doing this for the next 20-something years,” Chatman says. “It was a gloomy November day. After that year, I never got excited about [Thanksgiving] anymore.”

According to Cantrell, prisons will offer extra visitation hours on the holidays, but there are limitations on who gets to visit.

Dillard says his darkest holiday seasons were during a multi-year stretch of time he was serving at the Muskegon Correctional Facility in Muskegon, Mich.

“Me, my mother and my brother were all incarcerated at the same time,” Dillard says.  “I’d be by myself the entire time.”

That made communication amongst the family particularly difficult, Dillard says, because prison-to-prison communication was tightly controlled and costly, and visitation, of course, was impossible. But even after his family members got out of prison, visitation was hard because of their criminal records. Dillard, who today works for The Last Mile, a nonprofit aimed at reducing recidivism and breaking the cycle of incarceration, thinks prisons should do more to ease visitation rights for families like his.

“You have a lot of people who are formerly or currently incarcerated who come from generational incarceration," he says. "And when people are formerly incarcerated, it’s harder for them to come in and see you.”

But Dillard still remembers his last Thanksgiving, approximately five months before his release, when his mother visited. It was their first time together in 25 years.

“That visit was crazy. I’d been disappointed by the [lack of] support I’d received from my family during incarceration. But when she came, I was too happy to be mad,” Dillard says. “She was beautiful. Older, for sure–but she still reminded me of my mama. And getting that hug, it’s different from any hug you can get. And having her arms wrapped around me, sitting across from her in that visiting room, her being unable to take her eyes off me–it made me feel like I was a kid again.”

“She died a year after I came home,” he continues, "but that one memory wiped away years of pain and anger and grief.”

Cantrell says the holidays are a time when incarcerated people and guards have a more amicable relationship than usual. 

“The holidays are a pretty easy shift,” he says, adding that because corrections officers’ shifts are so long, they also miss the family meal, generating solidarity with the incarcerated. “It’s strange, a lot of the people that work there and live in there are having the same thoughts.”

Dillard agrees, saying that corrections officers are unusually helpful at the holidays. They tend to be more lenient around certain rules (e.g., not limiting how many people sit together at a table), while doing a better job enforcing others (e.g., making sure calls home are kept to 15 minutes so everyone in line to call gets the opportunity).

As for Chatman, he’s just happy to be out. And to this day, he doesn’t like Thanksgiving.

“I’ve gotten better, but I guess the habit of not celebrating has carried over. There are lasting effects,” Chatman says. 

But he does still celebrate other holidays: “I love Halloween. It’s the magic of dressing in a costume. And you have mobility. The freedom to move around. Plus: It wasn’t something we celebrated in prison.”