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If an institution gives preferential treatment to individuals based entirely on their identity, it’s absolutely understandable why someone would fake it if all it takes is self-declaration.
It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop, and I have little sympathy for the abusive, violent institution that is the US justice system. If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.
Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.
Reshaping the entire English language in order to deal with a novel form of identity politics doesn't seem as practical as simply refusing to recognize that novel form of idpol at all. It seems to create a pretty bad set of incentives.
It seems to me that "less idpol" means not chasing after the compromise point between the status quo and whatever new idpol (including the ludicrous notion that a man imprisoned in a prison with men - I assume you want to keep it this way - is somehow so not-a-man that we need to play this pretend game of eliminating gender distinctions...while maintaining the central distinction that keeps them in that jail in the first place) has now been spun up.
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Or, they could make their regular food better.
Hahaha. More seriously, the kosher food is explicitly noted to be prepackaged meals that may have more calories, probably because they’re prepackaged. This is probably also not great food, and prisoners prefer it because it’s packaged, not because it’s better.
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Given what I know of Ashkenazi food, this is much easier done than said.
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No, it's the court cases taken to force the prison system to cater to such extremes instead of being allowed to judge on a case-by-case basis of "Okay, Shlomo here really is Jewish but Darrell is just taking the piss".
Remember our dear friend Demi Minor, the 'woman' who got two women pregnant when transferred to a women's prison? In compliance with the law suit taken by the ACLU New Jersey (who are all about that decarceration) to force the New Jersey Department of Corrections to allow self-identified trans people to be jailed in the 'appropriate' prison:
Funnily enough, Tess and ACLU NJ had nothing to say when contacted about the Demi Minor case. Odd, that.
There's not much a prison governor can do even if they think "this is damn stupid" when informed "yeah well the judge ruled we gotta do this, oh yeah and make sure the wardens use 'Mx' when addressing the violent drug addict rapist murderer, you have to respect their feminine dignity".
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