Private Food, Public Harm: Privatized Food Service in Prisons and Jails
Introduction
Prison and jail food service in the United States is in dire need of reform. Across federal, state, and local facilities, meals served to incarcerated people are widely described as poorly prepared, nutrient-deficient, and unappetizing. While conditions can vary widely across carceral facilities, access to fresh, healthy, and safe food is lacking, and there are no national nutrition standards.
At the same time, a growing share of prisons and jails have outsourced food service management to private, for-profit companies. Among these, Aramark is the largest provider, capturing 35 percent of the $5.1 billion annual US market for carceral food service and serving approximately 400 million meals per year to incarcerated people. Policymakers and institutions often justify privatization as a means to reduce costs and simplify operations. However, incarcerated people and their allies have raised concerns that profit-driven models incentivize cost-cutting in ways that compromise nutrition, food safety, and dignity.
Even among the many cruelties that imprisonment inflicts, the specific violence of exploiting hunger to coerce people into consuming products that degrade their body and mental health and shorten their life, for days and years on end, stands out for its deliberate viciousness. I hope this report will call attention to the needless, immense cost of letting private profiteers corrupt what should be an opportunity to help people become the healthy, successful neighbors a decent society values. Good food policy can and should be saving the lives and dollars of the public, not providing profits to those who evade the costs of the harms they inflict.
-Atif Rafay, currently incarcerated Advisory Committee member and author, Correcting Food Policy in Washington Prisons
This report examines privatized food service in prisons and jails, focusing on Aramark. Because of the company’s outsized role in privatized carceral food service nationwide, we sought to better understand food service conditions in Aramark-managed facilities to identify opportunities for improvement that could have widespread impacts. Across three methods—a review of publicly available documents, key informant interviews, and a litigation analysis—our findings indicate that privatization may exacerbate harms, raising questions about accountability and value of food service management companies in carceral settings.
Take action here: Call for Aramark to improve prison food
Literature Review
Our review examined 134 publicly available documents, including peer-reviewed research, government reports, non-governmental reports, media sources, and company literature, to assess Aramark’s performance related to nutrition, palatability, food safety, and cost. We separately analyzed documents related to five state government and seven local government contracts with Aramark to provide food service management in prisons and jails.
We would have baked barbecue chicken. We would have fresh salad. We had a salad bar, actually. We had bowls, like actual bowls and spoons in the dining hall that we could just help ourselves to a bowl of cereal with a piece of fruit... One of the first things they did was they got rid of the bowls and spoons, and they got rid of the actual salad bar, you know, the actual machine that held the salad.
-Formerly incarcerated interview participant
Our findings indicate that:
- Nutrition: Aramark commonly falls short of providing adequate portions of nutritious meals in carceral facilities. We found evidence of discrepancies between Aramark-provided menus and specific recommendations of the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which emphasize eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, increasing whole grains, and limiting refined grains and sodium.
- Palatability: Unpalatable meals are a consistent experience in prisons and jails where food service is managed by Aramark. Common issues include lack of flavor, lack of variety, under- or over-cooking, and serving meals at the wrong temperature.
- Food Safety: Aramark’s food safety practices are inconsistent, putting incarcerated people at risk for acute illness wherever they fall short. Even putting health risks aside, serving spoiled food or food contaminated with maggots violates basic human dignity of incarcerated people.
- Contract Requirements: A limited review of Aramark contracts and related documents suggests that the reality of meals served and facility conditions is at odds with contract specifications for nutrition, food safety, and palatability.
- Costs: Multiple states have projected that outsourcing carceral food service to Aramark would create significant cost savings. Evidence of Aramark’s cost cutting at the expense of quality, overbilling, and contract violations casts doubt on the value the company claims to provide to its taxpayer-funded correctional clients.
Key Informant Interviews
We interviewed ten formerly incarcerated individuals, advocates, and carceral food service professionals to better understand how privatized food service operates in practice and how it affects daily life, health and dignity for incarcerated individuals. All participants had experience with Aramark food service.
Well, the changes that I saw, the first change that I noticed was the trays. The actual physical tray was changed. The physical tray that they replaced it with in privatization was a smaller tray, which meant that you got smaller portions. That was the first thing that I recognized. Then later, I would say, maybe a year later, we begin to notice the quality of the food begin to decline, and then maybe by the third year, we was looking at food that we really didn't even know what it was. We couldn't really even like recognize it during that point.
-Formerly incarcerated interview participant
Key Takeaways:
- Food Quality and Safety: Participants described consistent problems with food quality and safety in both self-operated and privatized prison and jail food service, including Aramark food service. Formerly incarcerated participants described these poor food conditions as dehumanizing and detrimental to their health and quality of life while incarcerated.
- Participants had heightened concerns about outsourcing food service to Aramark and similarly sized food service management companies, including the pursuit of efficiency and profit at the expense of food quality and safety, the emphasis on calories as the primary nutrition metric, and inability of staff to address problems.
- Participants who experienced a transition from self-operated to Aramark-operated food service reported declines in portion sizes, nutritional quality (e.g., fewer fruits and vegetables, more refined carbohydrates), variety, flavor, and food safety.
- Commissary: Participants described costly commissary purchases as critical to supplementing inadequate meals in all types of food service, partly due to odd meal times and long gaps between meals. Some participants felt that privatization exacerbated this problem in institutions where the same company holds the food service and commissary contracts, incentivizing the vendor to serve inadequate meals to drive commissary profits.
That's what people seem to miss the most, is they think that the portions have gotten significantly smaller, and they just kind of eat the same thing every day.
-Advocate interview participant
Litigation Analysis
There has been extensive litigation filed against Aramark challenging food in the carceral setting. We partnered with the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School to conduct a high-level analysis of the types of legal challenges filed against Aramark.
These companies, like Aramark, they get fined often for their bad practices. And then they still get their contracts renewed, which blows my mind, not even like, "do they still get contracts with other like agencies?" but they get their contracts renewed with the very agency they violated and breached contract and got fined by.
-Advocate interview participant
Key Takeaways:
- Based on the research, Aramark has been a party to litigation regarding carceral food conditions in 529 to 594 cases since 2000. These cases reveal widespread allegations of nutritionally inadequate, unsafe, and contaminated food.
- Most legal claims have been brought under the Eighth Amendment, arguing that inadequate or unsafe food constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Additional claims have been brought under the Fourteenth Amendment and the First Amendment, particularly in cases involving religious dietary needs. Across cases, common allegations include insufficient portions, spoiled or contaminated food, and failure to meet medical or religious dietary requirements.
- Despite the prevalence of these claims, legal relief is difficult to obtain. Individuals who are incarcerated—often representing themselves—face significant procedural barriers and must meet a high legal standard to establish cruel and unusual punishment. Many cases are dismissed for failure to meet these standards or procedural requirements, including failure to exhaust the institutional grievance process before bringing a suit.
Abbreviated Recommendations
Our findings point to meaningful opportunities for carceral institutions, their vendors, and policymakers to improve food safety, palatability, and nutrition standards and ensure compliance. We offer the following overarching principles and recommendations for corporate and institutional decision-makers to better protect the health and dignity of incarcerated people. See the full report for a complete list of recommendations.
Overarching Principles for Carceral Food Service
What in my view defines success? I think efficient, nutritional food that doesn't necessitate people going to commissary, and that has long term positive health impacts... I think adequate amount of food, at times when people actually eat, that [the] food is nutritional and gives them the needed things, but that it's also dignified.
-Advocate interview participant
- Meals should be safe, appealing, nutritious, and prepared and served in a way that respects the dignity of people in custody.
- People in custody should never have to depend on commissary or other food-for-purchase venues to replace unsafe, nutritionally inadequate, or unpalatable meals.
- Menus should adhere to evidence-based food and nutrition standards that consider chronic disease prevention and health promotion in addition to nutrient adequacy and prioritize fresh and minimally processed foods.
Recommendations for Food Service Management Companies
The food isn't failing inside because … there aren't some level of requirements, they flout them and they don't give a sh*t. And so you don't change that by instituting more rules. It is the fact that people don't care about the rules that is our big issue. And I think that that is just because of the nature of that environment, and the beast, and who's in charge, and who gets to make the decisions, which are not the people who suffer at their hands.
-Formerly incarcerated interview participant
- Strengthen accountability for employees to comply with existing company policies and contractual commitments. Additional accountability measures could include:
- Publishing results of company-wide third party audits in a public accountability report annually.
- Establishing internal whistleblower reporting mechanisms and protections.
- Requiring staff to maintain photo repositories of sample meal trays to ensure menu fidelity.
- Limiting staff authorization to substitute less nutritious alternatives to menu items.
- Adopt company-wide daily serving requirements for prison and jail menus, including fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and protein foods, and limits on sodium, saturated fat, added sugar.
- Prohibit diluting food with water or reducing portion sizes to stretch the number of portions per recipe.
- Ensure healthy commissary options are available and priced at or below other options in the same product category.
Recommendations for Policymakers and Carceral Institutions
- In general, avoid outsourcing self-operated food services to large private vendors.
- Establish evidence-based food and nutrition standards for prison and jail menus.
- Allocate sufficient resources for nutritious, palatable, and safe food service.
- Establish an effective independent oversight body with authority for unannounced inspections covering nutrition, safety, and palatability.
For jurisdictions that currently outsource food service:
- Contract Development and Vendor Selection
- Use best-value procurement, not lowest bid.
- Strengthen contract requirements to align with evidence-based nutrition and food safety standards.
- Do not award food service and commissary contracts to the same parent company.
- Contract Oversight
- Require routine unannounced inspections by institutional staff or a third party and publish results.
- Hire an in-house dietitian to develop/review menus.
- Enforce contract requirements with meaningful financial penalties; do not renew vendors with repeated violations.
- Create independent feedback loops from people in custody to oversight entities; include vendor penalties for consistently poor meal scores.
- Before rebidding, evaluate whether outsourcing saved money without degrading quality; consider returning food service in-house or contracting local/nonprofit vendors.
The second thing I would recommend was having an inmate population that can monitor, you know, the food and work together with Aramark to say, "Hey, this is not healthy. Can we try for this?" Like, you know, kind of negotiate.
-Formerly incarcerated interview participant
Oversight. That's the only thing that's going to do it. Serious oversight and consequences. With oversight, sure you can identify what's wrong, but if there are no consequences for what's going wrong, then what good is oversight in itself? It's nothing. There has to be both, there has to be oversight and consequences.
-Formerly incarcerated interview participant