[AnthonyMouse]

There is an extent to which this is already the case. If you're homeless and unemployed, three hots and a cot starts to sound mighty attractive.

The obvious solution is to make sure the same benefits are available to the general public without the requirement of criminality.

[tptacek]

Since the obvious solution is politically intractable and would require fundamentally altering the way all resources are allocated and collected by the government, you can see why a program to extend that benefit only to prisoners (which, but for the optics, might have been tractable) would cause an uproar.