How Prison Food Became Barely Edible — And a Billion-Dollar Industry

Filed
12:00 p.m. EST

03.08.2025

A market evaluation stated the meals service business in U.S. prisons and jails is value billions — and is forecasted to develop.

That is The Marshall Venture’s Closing Argument publication, a weekly deep dive right into a key prison justice difficulty. Need this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters.

Feeding incarcerated individuals has turn into huge enterprise as states and counties outsource their meals service operations. The meals behemoth Aramark (which additionally companies schools, hospitals, and sports activities stadiums), in addition to smaller firms like Summit Correctional Providers and Trinity Providers Group, have inked contracts within the final decade value a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} in prisons and jails throughout the nation. Privatization of jail meals isn’t a brand new phenomenon, but it surely’s rising considerably. In response to one market evaluation, the business was value virtually $3.2 billion in 2022 in the USA alone, and is forecasted to continue to grow.

The meals in jail is, as a rule, dangerous. You don’t want an investigative journalist to inform you that. Typically privatization is touted by the businesses themselves and the general public officers who rent them as a approach to enhance high quality, lower your expenses, or each. However a better have a look at circumstances in states that privatized and those who haven’t reveals most of the similar widespread issues.

It’s not simply that meals are bland and unappetizing — although they typically are. Cellular phone pictures smuggled out of jails and prisons throughout the nation reveal meals that hardly seems to be edible, not to mention nutritious. A Marshall Venture headline describing the impact of the pandemic on jail meals learn, “Ewwwww, What Is That?” In lawsuits and information reviews, kitchen staff at prisons in Arizona, Oregon, and elsewhere reported seeing containers of meals that had been served to prisoners marked: “not for human consumption.”

Meals at Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, in 2020, in keeping with lawyer Marcy Croft.

At a jail in Cleveland, employees warned directors in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity had been so disgusting, that they put employees in peril, Cleveland.com reported. “I’m scared for my life, and the lifetime of our officers who’re requested at hand out these horrible meals,” one staffer wrote his supervisors. “My prayer is that myself or any of our officers usually are not assaulted due to these meals.”

There’s additionally not sufficient meals. A 2020 examine by the prison justice reform advocacy group Influence Justice discovered that 94% of incarcerated individuals surveyed stated they didn’t obtain sufficient meals to really feel full. Greater than 60% stated they not often or by no means had entry to recent greens. With the typical wage paid to incarcerated staff maxing out at properly underneath a greenback an hour and commissary costs rising, the meals served within the chow corridor is usually individuals’s solely sustenance. Meager parts have left determined individuals consuming toothpaste and bathroom paper, as my colleague Alysia Santo reported. Jail officers say starvation has led to unrest and a riot.

“Our menu is sufficient to preserve us alive, I suppose, however by no means sufficient to provide and fulfill the appetites of grown males,” David DeLena, incarcerated at a state jail in California, informed me in 2022. Most states spend lower than $3 per particular person per day on jail meals — and a few as little as $1.02 — in keeping with the evaluation by Influence Justice. Even Maine, broadly seen as a mannequin for offering good high quality meals in its prisons, solely spends $4.05 per particular person, per day. Against this, the Meals and Drug Administration’s “thrifty plan” estimates that feeding an grownup man “a nutritious, sensible, cost-effective weight-reduction plan” prices about $10 per day.

Within the final decade, a number of states shortly jettisoned non-public contracts after lawsuits revealed unsanitary and, frankly, disgusting circumstances. In 2021, Mississippi canceled a contract with Aramark after a federal lawsuit described “spoiled, rotten, molded or raw” meals, contaminated with rat, chicken or insect feces. In 2015, Michigan switched from Aramark to Trinity for comparable causes, solely to have most of the similar issues: maggots, mould, and dust in meals, and bouts of meals poisoning. Michigan ultimately resumed managing its personal meals service when its three-year, almost $159-million contract with Trinity resulted in 2018.

“They are not asking for five-star meals,” Marcy Croft, the lawyer on the Mississippi lawsuit, informed CBS Information. “They’re simply asking for meals that is edible and that may preserve them alive — it is a very fundamental request.”

A part of the issue, critics say, is a battle of curiosity: All three of the key non-public meals suppliers even have a stake within the booming jail commissary enterprise, the place incarcerated individuals should buy staples like ramen, tuna and occasional, in addition to chips, cookies and different snacks. In 2022, Aramark purchased the commissary firm Union Provide Group. Summit Correctional Providers contains each meals companies and a commissary arm. Trinity is owned by the identical non-public fairness agency as Keefe, one of many dominant commissary firms. A Detroit Free Press columnist requested whether or not the Trinity-Keefe merger was “a motive to serve yucky meals?” Poor meals served within the chow corridor drives hungry prisoners to the commissary, which solely provides to the businesses’ backside traces, Croft, the Mississippi lawyer, informed me. “Crappy meals is being paid for twice. After which the state is paying for the medical care on that,” she stated.

One other drawback is that there’s no such factor as a shock kitchen inspection at a jail. Due to safety precautions, well being departments have to rearrange inspections upfront. In sworn testimonies, individuals in jail describe manic cleansing sprees upfront of inspectors’ visits. Even when violations are discovered, inspectors are usually reluctant to close down the kitchens, as they’d a restaurant. How else would incarcerated individuals eat? One inspection report in a New Mexico jail discovered mice droppings and “Blood and milk on the ground in walk-in cooler” — but the kitchen was nonetheless “permitted.”

The proliferation of “jailhouse cookbooks” may suggest that consuming behind bars can tackle a scrappy, can-do — even enjoyable — high quality in case you have the precise angle and cash for provides from the commissary. However meals has at all times been a supply of heat and camaraderie, a vivid spot in darkish locations. My former colleague Keri Blakinger recalled how, on her first Thanksgiving in jail, she and a customer raided the visiting room merchandising machines and used a paper clip to carve the phrases “turkey” and “mashed potatoes” onto the Snickers and Reese’s. Till jail chow halls serve palatable, nutritious meals, which may be the perfect individuals can do.