From The Marshall Project:
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.” Continue reading >>>
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