This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters.
Food service company Aramark is leaving incarcerated people in West Virginia with empty stomachs and their loved ones with empty pockets, a federal class-action lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in West Virginia, claims that Aramark is exploiting incarcerated people at Mount Olive Correctional Complex by denying them adequate meals — instead pushing them and their families to spend money on food items and care packages they must also purchase from the same company.
Marcus P. McKinley said in a court filing that he has seen the quality of the food decline during his nearly 12 years in Mount Olive — being served leftovers and turkey “pellets” in place of fresh meat — as well as the quantity. He spends nearly all his $70 monthly income on commissary items to supplement the small food portions. Another plaintiff, Judy Riggs, said she spent over $4,000 to buy meals from Aramark’s food-for-purchase programs for her incarcerated loved ones since 2022.
“Food is a uniquely powerful tool, and Aramark is using it to exploit a captive consumer market of incarcerated people and their families to unlawfully profit off them,” Shennan Kavanagh, director of litigation at the National Consumer Law Center, said in a press release.
The lawsuit alleges that this scheme unfairly targets incarcerated people in a bid to drive profits for Aramark, which generated $18.5 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Aramark has exclusive control over all food in West Virginia’s correctional facilities, and is the largest food services provider for prisons and jails in the United States, according to the lawsuit. As of Dec. 1, Aramark’s portfolio includes 16 state departments of corrections. Last year, the company reported serving approximately 450 correctional facilities.
For Teri Castle, the shift to Aramark in 2019 was noticeable. She was incarcerated and working in the kitchen at West Virginia’s Lakin Correctional Center. She watched as the fresh produce grown to stock the salad bar disappeared. Hamburger patties were replaced with processed substitutes and real eggs with processed ones.
The shift became noticeable in her health, too. She had little energy and her stomach just “wasn’t working right.” She struggled with chronic constipation, high blood pressure and hemorrhoids so bad that she ultimately needed surgery.
“They are more interested in making money and saving money than they are in the health of the people eating that food,” Castle said.
The new legal challenge is based on consumer protection laws intended to prevent unfair, deceptive or abusive practices. At the federal level, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has traditionally been tasked with enforcing these laws, while states also have their own consumer protection statutes and enforcement mechanisms.
The lawsuit alleges that Aramark is in violation of the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act because it is unfair to people who — because their incarceration limits what they can buy and where they can buy it from — have no other, less exploitative options to feed themselves.
The National Consumer Law Center, an economic justice advocacy organization involved in the lawsuit, last year deemed incarcerated people particularly vulnerable to financial exploitation because of their limited financial resources, low education levels and high rates of mental illness.
“The goal here really is just to require that companies follow the same laws with respect to incarcerated people that they have to follow with everybody else. That they’re not allowed to exploit people because they’re incarcerated,” said Rebecca Livengood, a lawyer representing the incarcerated people and their families in this lawsuit.
Aramark did not respond to requests for comment.
Prison food is notoriously bad, and Aramark has been the subject of many food-related horror stories. These reports include food contaminated with mouse droppings, maggots, cakes nibbled on by rats, spoiled chicken and “mass poisonings.”
The new lawsuit, though, focuses on the lack of food available to incarcerated people each day. This problem is not new, nor is it confined to West Virginia. In Nevada, incarcerated people reported eating toothpaste, antacids, salt and toilet paper to ease hunger pangs.
Food insecurity in prison can have lasting effects, both physically and mentally, said Leslie Soble, author of the newly released book “Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison.”
“You get sentenced to five years in prison, or whatever the sentence is. You don’t get sentenced to five years in prison and lifelong diabetes. But that’s the kind of thing that’s actually happening to people,” Soble said. “That in itself is a form of extended punishment.”
The allegations in the lawsuit came as no surprise to Soble, whose research included surveying formerly incarcerated people and visiting prison kitchens. This research, compiled in a 2020 report, found many of the same horror stories, including spoiled food and skimpy portions.
Experts say food is just one sector of a larger prison services industry that siphons wealth from some of the country’s poorest communities. Family members of incarcerated people have reported going into debt from the costs of phone calls and visits, or working multiple jobs to afford them.
Incarcerated people and their families also buy toiletries and basic hygiene products, fans in the sweltering heat of the summer, snacks from the commissary, medical care and clothing. These products are often overpriced, despite abysmal wages for prison labor. Incarcerated workers often earn less than $1 per hour, if they are paid at all.
“It’s a literally captive market,” Livengood said. “It’s a group of people who have no ability to purchase anything other than what they’re allowed to purchase. And in so many of those facets of life, food, clothing, video, visits, emails … Many of those have now been farmed out to companies who expect to profit from them.”
Meanwhile, the large companies that dominate prison services bring in billions in revenue — nearly as much as governments pay to operate private prisons. And the correctional facilities they do business with often benefit as well, in the form of site commissions, a percentage of the sales revenue.
There is little regulation of these dominant companies that monopolize “prison retail,” wrote Stephen Raher, an attorney who previously served as general counsel of the Prison Policy Initiative. Instead, protections for incarcerated consumers remain “scattered and often illusory.”
“Time and time again, concerns about abusive monopolist business practices are dismissed by policymakers who claim that correctional agencies take these matters into account when awarding exclusive vendor contracts,” Rather wrote.
In recent years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has delivered some victories for incarcerated people.
In 2021, the CFPB fined JPay, a financial services company, for charging people newly released from prison unfair fees to access their own money on prepaid debit cards they were required to use.
And in 2024, the CFPB ordered Global Tel Link to return $3 million to its consumers. The Bureau found that the company engaged in unfair practices by blocking consumers’ accounts and preventing friends and family from sending funds via debit or credit card transfer.
However, similar relief may be harder to come by, as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the agency. Last month, the Justice Department declared the agency’s funding mechanism unlawful, which could leave it without a budget next year. And this week, a top official at the agency resigned, citing his frustration with the lack of a path for the agency to enforce the law.
