Crime & Safety

For This Prisoner, Fish is Off the Menu

State agrees to alternative menu for vegetarian inmate after PETA gets involved.

The state Department of Correction has agreed to serve an inmate at Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Institution in Montville something other than fish when it comes up on the prison menu after the inmate asked for help from the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The Day of New London reported.

The inmate — Howard W. Cosby — enlisted PETA’s help after he requested a vegetarian diet as a practicing Buddhist and the DOC balked, claiming fish was not a meat. PETA wrote a letter that asserted, in part, that fish have thoughts, interests and a central nervous system.

According to The Day, Deputy Warden Giuliana Mudano recently wrote PETA’s attorneys to say the state would give Cosby “a nutritionally adequate substitute whenever fish would appear in his menu cycle.”

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Cosby was arrested for sexually assaulting a teenager in Bridgeport in 2002, convicted in 2004 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

"We're very pleased that (the warden) has acceded to Mr. Cosby's legally grounded religious demands and acknowledged that fish aren't swimming vegetables," said attorney Jeff Kerr, general counsel to PETA, in The Day story. "Prison officials should certainly encourage an inmate's adherence to the principles of nonviolence in all forms, including regarding his or her diet."

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What do you think? Should prisons cater to inmates' dietary requests based on religion? Tell us in the comments.


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