Justices Chill Plea for Heat in Jail Chow

California’s highest court turned a cold shoulder Thursday to hot salsa and chili peppers, refusing to hear an appeal by Latino inmates seeking to have the spicy condiments served in the Orange County Jail.

With Justice Allen E. Broussard dissenting, the state Supreme Court denied the appeal of the inmates, who had asserted that jail officials’ refusal to serve salsa, Tabasco sauce or similar spices was tantamount to ethnic discrimination.

The lawsuit brought by Thomas F. Maniscalco, who is being held at the jail in Santa Ana, awaiting trial for murder, had argued that state prisons and many other county jails serve Mexican food. But Maniscalco said he and other inmates at the Orange County Jail get bland tamales perhaps once a month. At the same time, some other non-Latino ethnic foods are served with their normal sauces, he said.

“Denying these people their Mexican diets would be denying them their culture and character as Mexicans,” Maniscalco wrote to the court.

He quoted from a book about chili peppers saying that to the Mexican, chili was more than a food: “It’s a way of life . . . a religious icon and a source of consolation for the downtrodden.”

The demand for the salsa and hot peppers is so great in jail, Maniscalco said in a telephone interview from jail in September, that trusties get salsa from the deputies’ mess and sell it to other inmates.

He said 450 inmates, more than half of them Latino, had signed a petition to Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates calling for Latino foods and spices at the jail.

Earlier this year, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said the condiments were not generally allowed because inmates could use them as weapons, shoving them into the eyes of deputies or other inmates.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno refused in September to overturn the jail policy, saying the rule was not the type that “can be classified as unduly unreasonable.”

Deputy County Counsel Wanda Florence wrote to the court in reply to the suit that the law requires only “plain and wholesome food” at the jail.

An inmate’s “taste bud desires” do not amount to constitutional rights, she said. She also said jail officials believe an attempt to serve foods such as salsa or soy sauce “could lead to violence between the various ethnic groups.”