Visitors Cheated By: Sandra Feigley,
Cofounder-Publisher
Visitors to some Pennsylvania prisons including the infamous
dungeon at Frackville in East-Central Pennsylvania, are now being
cheated in a new way. An exploitative New York outfit,
American Food and
Vending, has been given the contract to sell food and
drinks in the prison visiting area. The prices are absurdly
outrageous! A small sandwich worth $2 or less is sold for $5.
Cakes and candy bars are sold for $2, but worth not even half
that much. Crap coffee (mostly water) costs $1 when the machines
works. The whole idea is to gouge as much money as possible out
of visitors.
A woman with a couple children could easily be gouged $100 for food and drinks to feed her husband and family. And that's after she's traveled for hours and paid over $3 a gallon for gas! A visit to Frackville by an impoverished Philadelphia family could cost mom $150 or more! That will discourage her! Then, when she's at the prison, she has to put up with the most abusive staff of any prison in the state. She and her kids are harassed/assaulted by dogs and probed by the bogus drug sniffer. It's obvious that the prison administration is trying hard to discourage visiting, to intimidate and cheat visitors and to make profit for their own pockets. Prison administrators have a duty to encourage families to stay together by encouraging visiting. Prison administrators have a duty to protect the interests of prisoners and their families. Instead, the prison administrators are making a profit by gouging visitors. My recent conversation with a deputy prison superintendent proved to me that administrators' mind-set is two fold; to bully everybody including visitors and to pump up their pathetic, flagging egos. They play at being cops and, worst yet, they play at being corrupt business people. The new ploy is to be a "Kwickie-Mart" to pick the pockets of the poor. While I haven't yet seen the contract, apparently, some fool made a deal with American Food and Vending. It continues an established pattern of giving business, not Pennsylvania's struggling local economy, but to out-of-state companies. Seemingly, American Food and Vending is operated by brothers, Martin and Steven Wells, from a warehouse at 3606 John Glenn Boulevard in Syracuse, New York. They appear to have a branch office at 143 Darling st. in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania as well as in a number of other places some as remote as Missouri. Reports suggest that American Food and Vending have a number of operations in hospitals, factories and offices, any place where working class people can be exploited. Their prison venture is especially odious! We very strongly urge everybody, prison staff as well as prison visitors, to boycott American Food and Vending's overpriced products. We urge everybody to complain to the Department of Imprisonment. Who gives petty bureaucrats the power to make contracts which aren't in the interest of the people? For the machines at the Frackville prison, we've recently learned that they use tokens from the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain. It seems that the tokens that cost 25¢ each at the prison, cost only 10¢ or less from Chuck E Cheese. Of course, we're not suggesting that visitors cheat the cheaters by getting tokens at Chuck E Cheese and spending them in the prison machines. That would be as dishonest as what the prison is doing. We only observe that with Chuck E Cheese tokens a $5 sandwich would cost only $2 and mom wouldn't be getting cheated by the Wells brothers and their prison partners. Since we first published this story about the greed of Frackville prison and its partner, we've tried to find out which prison bureaucrats are behind cheating prison visitors by personally profiting from the vending machine contract. It appears that these dubious "public servants" have effectively covered their butts. Bureaucrats circled the wagons to keep their "indiscretions" from being exposed. John Shaffer, deputy secretary of the Department of Imprisonment and his minions, failed to provide us with essential contract documents. Apparently the contract was given to American Food and Vending under the table without proper competitive bidding or even an announcement in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. Somebody's making a killing at visitors' expense! It's not surprising. The Department of Imprisonment is crooked from the top down. What's more, the greedy vendor with the cooperation of the even more unscrupulous prison administration, recently changed the tokens being used in the vending machines. Infuriated with the grossly exorbitant prices and dismal selection many visitors seem to have been buying tokens outside the prison at a big discount. They then used the outside tokens in the prison vending machines. That brought prices more into line with what they should be (about half of what they are now). Of course, the use of outside tokens cut into the huge profits of American Food and Vending and the Frackville prison. They were hit where it hurt them most; in the greed. The new tokens (still supposedly worth 25¢ in the vending machines are available in bulk for about 12.5¢ each from Tokens Direct. Their Internet address is is www.tokensdirect.com/. Of course, we're not suggesting that anyone cheat the cheaters, but thought some visitors, especially the regulars, might want to know. The quicker we can get rid of American Food and Vending, the quicker a decent vendor may be contracted, prices brought down and selection improved.
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