Filed
12:00 p.m. EST
03.08.2025
A market analysis said the food service industry in U.S. prisons and jails is worth billions — and is forecasted to grow.
Maine, widely seen as a model for providing good food in its prisons, only spends $4.05 per person, per day. Food trays at Maine Correctional Center in Windham in 2023.
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Feeding incarcerated people has become big business as states and counties outsource their food service operations. The food behemoth Aramark (which also services colleges, hospitals, and sports stadiums), as well as smaller corporations like Summit Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, have inked contracts in the last decade worth hundreds of millions of dollars in prisons and jails across the country. Privatization of prison food isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s growing substantially. According to one market analysis, the industry was worth almost $3.2 billion in 2022 in the United States alone, and is forecasted to keep growing.
The food in prison is, as a rule, bad. You don’t need an investigative journalist to tell you that. Generally privatization is touted by the companies themselves and the public officials who hire them as a way to improve quality, save money, or both. But a closer look at conditions in states that privatized and those that haven’t reveals many of the same widespread problems.
It’s not just that meals are bland and unappetizing — though they often are. Cell phone images smuggled out of jails and prisons across the country reveal food that hardly looks edible, let alone nutritious. A Marshall Project headline describing the effect of the pandemic on prison meals read, “Ewwwww, What Is That?” In lawsuits and news reports, kitchen workers at prisons in Arizona, Oregon, and elsewhere reported seeing boxes of food that were served to prisoners marked: “not for human consumption.”
Meals at Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, in 2020, according to attorney Marcy Croft.
At a jail in Cleveland, staff warned administrators in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity were so disgusting, that they put staff in danger, Cleveland.com reported. “I am scared for my life, and the life of our officers who are asked to hand out these horrible meals,” one staffer wrote his supervisors. “My prayer is that myself or any of our officers are not assaulted because of these meals.”
There’s also not enough food. A 2020 study by the criminal justice reform advocacy group Impact Justice found that 94% of incarcerated people surveyed said they did not receive enough food to feel full. More than 60% said they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables. With the average wage paid to incarcerated workers maxing out at well under a dollar an hour and commissary prices rising, the food served in the chow hall is often people’s only sustenance. Meager portions have left desperate people eating toothpaste and toilet paper, as my colleague Alysia Santo reported. Prison officials say hunger has led to unrest and a riot.
“Our menu is enough to keep us alive, I suppose, but never enough to supply and satisfy the appetites of grown men,” David DeLena, incarcerated at a state prison in California, told me in 2022. Most states spend less than $3 per person per day on prison food — and some as little as $1.02 — according to the analysis by Impact Justice. Even Maine, widely seen as a model for providing good quality food in its prisons, only spends $4.05 per person, per day. By contrast, the Food and Drug Administration’s “thrifty plan” estimates that feeding an adult man “a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” costs about $10 per day.
In the last decade, several states quickly jettisoned private contracts after lawsuits revealed unsanitary and, frankly, disgusting conditions. In 2021, Mississippi canceled a contract with Aramark after a federal lawsuit described “spoiled, rotten, molded or uncooked” food, contaminated with rat, bird or insect feces. In 2015, Michigan switched from Aramark to Trinity for similar reasons, only to have many of the same problems: maggots, mold, and dirt in food, and bouts of food poisoning. Michigan eventually resumed managing its own food service when its three-year, nearly $159-million contract with Trinity ended in 2018.
“They aren’t asking for five-star meals,” Marcy Croft, the attorney on the Mississippi lawsuit, told CBS News. “They’re just asking for food that’s edible and that can keep them alive — it’s a very basic request.”
Part of the problem, critics say, is a conflict of interest: All three of the major private food providers also have a stake in the booming prison commissary business, where incarcerated people can buy staples like ramen, tuna and coffee, as well as chips, cookies and other snacks. In 2022, Aramark bought the commissary company Union Supply Group. Summit Correctional Services includes both food services and a commissary arm. Trinity is owned by the same private equity firm as Keefe, one of the dominant commissary companies. A Detroit Free Press columnist asked whether the Trinity-Keefe merger was “a motive to serve yucky meals?” Poor food served in the chow hall drives hungry prisoners to the commissary, which only adds to the companies’ bottom lines, Croft, the Mississippi lawyer, told me. “Crappy food is being paid for twice. And then the state is paying for the medical care on that,” she said.
Another problem is that there’s no such thing as a surprise kitchen inspection at a prison. Because of security precautions, health departments have to arrange inspections in advance. In sworn testimonies, people in prison describe manic cleaning sprees in advance of inspectors’ visits. Even when violations are found, inspectors are generally reluctant to shut down the kitchens, as they would a restaurant. How else would incarcerated people eat? One inspection report in a New Mexico prison found mice droppings and “Blood and milk on the floor in walk-in cooler” — yet the kitchen was still “approved.”
The proliferation of “jailhouse cookbooks” might imply that eating behind bars can take on a scrappy, can-do — even fun — quality if you have the right attitude and money for supplies from the commissary. But food has always been a source of warmth and camaraderie, a bright spot in dark places. My former colleague Keri Blakinger recalled how, on her first Thanksgiving in prison, she and a visitor raided the visiting room vending machines and used a paper clip to carve the words “turkey” and “mashed potatoes” onto the Snickers and Reese’s. Until prison chow halls serve palatable, nutritious meals, that may be the best people can do.
