http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21302925

I'd guess the taxpayer will be getting bent over for this one

Probably. And that sort of thing pisses me off. Sure it shouldn't have happened, but in my opinion prisoners shouldn't be allowed compensation for anything as part of their punishment.

Is it just me or does anyone else think "so what".

First, it's for "religious" reasons.
Second, they're in prison.

Any compensation while inside should go to victim support.

It is for religious reasons, which personally I think should still be respected. But it's more than that, I've got a vegetarian friend, she has only ever eaten meat by accident (given the wrong burger or spag bol) and she's been really quite ill after. I don't know if the same can happen if someone cuts a specific meat from their diet?

To be honest, I think it's lucky they get meat at all. If I was in charge it'd be bread and water.

After a long episode of vegetarianism, I tend to stick to "white meat". Red meats just make me ill and I have vomited it up on occasion.

And if they had coeliacs, would you be happy to pay for glutenfree bread even though it'd be at least 5x more expensive?

IIRC pork for Muslims is a big no-no and one of the few things strictly observed by almost all Muslims. Hence this would be a more heinous crime to them than giving them horsemeat instead.

Your more devout muslims pretty much expect some of this when their food is being handled by non muslims. Any of those guys who are in prison would probably only eat veggie food while there.

To paraphrase any of the people who said it, "a society is measured by the way it treats its prisoners". And I'm no pinko, but I agree with that.

I agree. We are also judged by how we care for our weak and elderly. On that score we are not doing particularly well.

And we are measured as idiots because we treat ours so well, a lot of them wasnt to stay there as it's so cushy.

It's confusing to me that our prisons are at the same time both scandalous luxury hotels and scandalous suicide rape pits.

I suppose the average hotel in Blackpool might be both luxurious and suicide inducing, but in most other places the two are mutually exclusive.

There are many reasons for the high recidivism rate. Norwegian prisons are even cushier than ours, yet they have an even lower recidivism rate. I think that the real reasons for their success lies in the fact that the inequality is considerably less there, and the extremes are not so in your face, as they are here. They have lower unemployment and high minimum wages which means that you can live quite well on the minimum wage, whereas here you need to work extra hours just to cope on minimum wage, and still have a lower standard of living than in Norway.

So we should improve retraining in prisons to give them a real chance of succeeding once they are out. Yet it is treated as an after thought. All that we do is create angry people with less opportunities because so many jobs now require CRB checks.

I controlled my gout by modifying my diet for years. In the end, I still have to take tablets. But I haven't eaten beef or pork products for over 7 years now.

I went to a wedding in the summer and they served "Wedding Soup", which is various different vegetables plus dumplings. I didn't think anything about it, but the first dumpling I ate tasted like pork, so I stopped eating. It was too late, within 10 minutes I felt sick and half an hour later, I had chronic wind. An hour later a case of diarrhea, then I started to feel better again.

The same at Christmas, we had potato soup and sausages for lunch on the way to the concert. I left the sausages and ate 1 spoon of soup, I could immediately taste the bacon in the soup and left the rest, but I still had stomach ache and wind for the rest of the day. In the evening, I had ordered chicken with fried potatoes, but the potato came fried in bacon fat with bits of bacon with it. Again, it made my stomach ache worst and I spent an hour in the toilet afterwards.

RE the sickness and allergy points.

None of those are religious reasons. If someone genuinely cannot eat something then I'm not saying they should be force fed it.

Please stop taking my point to an extreme that I didn't make.