by Daniel A. Rosen

My most vivid memory of Aramark’s food service inside jails and prisons came early on in my incarceration: I watched a man at the D.C. Jail dig into the entrée on his evening meal tray and uncover half a dead mouse. Those of us around him struggled with our own gag reflexes while he lost his composure, yelling about the lawsuit he was going to file, and for a guard to come document the evidence. It was traumatic, for him and for everyone close enough to see it happen. That incident was the single most disturbing episode from my time eating inside—but probably had less long-term health impact than the cumulative effect of years of eating inedible, unnutritious, poor-quality meals.

I spent about six years eating both Aramark-prepared meals in jails and state-prepared trays in prisons. If there’s one thing both systems taught me, it’s that “self-operated” and “privatized” food service are really just two different flavors of contempt. There’s a difference though between neglect funded by the public payroll and the for-profit variety that comes with a shareholder base and C-suite salaries. A new report released this spring finally puts details and numbers on the contrast.

On May 1, 2026, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and the Carceral Nutrition Project (CNP), an organization I founded after coming home, released "Private Food, Public Harm: Privatized Food Service in Prisons and Jails" (CSPI, May 2026). The report is a comprehensive examination of the carceral business sector that determines what a very large percentage of the two million incarcerated Americans eat every day, with a focus on the single company that decides it most often: Aramark.

Feeding Incarcerated People For Profit

Regular readers of this publication already know the shape of the “punishment economy”—the sprawling ecosystem of phone companies, food service and commissary vendors, health care contractors, and transport firms that turn those two million incarcerated people into a permanent revenue stream. [See: PLN, May 2021, p.1.] Food service is one of the oldest and least scrutinized limbs of that body. Many of the nation’s 6,000+ jails and prisons still prepare food in-house, at least nominally. But the trend is toward outsourcing, with 18 state corrections agencies now contracting for food service from private vendors.

HTF Market Intelligence estimates the correctional food service market was worth roughly $5.1 billion in 2024, up from $3.9 billion in 2020. Three companies control the majority of it: Aramark Correctional Services (ACS) holds 35% of the market, pulling in $1.78 billion in correctional revenue in 2024; Trinity Services Group, a company that only services jails and prisons, holds 9%; Summit Food Service, under French parent company Elior, holds 8%. A long list of smaller regional players splits what’s left, primarily servicing county jails, each with less than 2%.

Aramark’s footprint specifically consists of statewide contracts in 17 states (of 18 total with contracted food service), covering about 24% of the country’s state prisons and 37% of the 1.1 million people held in them. The company claims roughly 500 correctional accounts nationwide as of last December, meaning well over a hundred local jails are part of their portfolio, in addition to state prison systems. They do not publish a list of their correctional clients.

Contract prices vary widely depending on the size of each state’s prison population and length, but they all land in a pretty grim cost band. Kentucky pays Aramark $3.65 a day per person for three meals. Ohio pays $4.62. Florida pays as little as $3.05. Missouri, in a five-year, $228.5 million contract, pays up to $5.56. The District of Columbia pays between $5.76 and $7.53 a day, though only a fraction of that ends up on the tray. For context, the USDA’s own Thrifty Food Plan—the federal government’s baseline for calculating SNAP benefits—uses $10 dollars per day as the cost for nutritionally adequate meals for adult males as of February 2024.

Correctional agencies have offered cost savings as a rationale for handing food service over to contractors ever since the practice took off in the 1970s. One market analysis cited in the new report claims food service management companies can shave 15 to 25% off per-meal costs compared to self-operation by a corrections department. States have projected savings ranging from $3 million a year in Missouri to $48 million over three years in Michigan. What’s less discussed is how those savings materialize. According to the report, “Advocates, researchers, and journalists report that contractors further reduce food costs by reducing the quality and quantity of food served,” and that companies “allegedly reduce labor costs by replacing unionized staff with nonunionized staff who receive lower wages.” In other words, the savings aren’t conjured from efficiency, they’re extracted from the people eating the food and the people cooking it.

Decades of Maggots and Misconduct

None of this should be news to this publication’s readers. PLN has been documenting Aramark’s record for over a decade, and the archive reads like the same three or four stories on a loop, recycled from one state to another. Oklahoma and Alabama have recently joined the roster of states offering Aramark Correctional’s daily culinary malpractice, joining Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Back in 2015, PLN reported that Aramark had been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by Michigan and Ohio for infestations of maggots and vermin found in prison kitchens and dining halls. [See: PLN, Dec. 2015, p.1.] They were discovered at three different Ohio facilities, and repeatedly in Michigan, where one employee was fired after ordering a prisoner to cut the rodent-gnawed edges off a cake and serve the rest to the general population.

Michigan ultimately terminated its three-year, $145 million contract with the company a year early, citing unapproved menu substitutions, employee misconduct (including staff smuggling contraband and having sexual relationships with prisoners) and chronic understaffing. Around the same time, a Burlington County, New Jersey jail guard named Crystal Jordan told a reporter that after Aramark took over food service, “the bread was stale,” she “saw food in the kitchen with mold on it,” and prisoners regularly came down with diarrhea and vomiting.

By 2024, when PLN checked in again, Aramark’s correctional subsidiary was pulling in roughly $1.5 billion a year and the company’s market value had climbed past $8 billion, even as Mississippi declined to renew its contract following a lawsuit over spoiled and undercooked food, and Nevada put its own contract under “comprehensive review” after inspectors turned up a litany of familiar deficiencies. [See: PLN, May 2024, p.1.] One prisoner interviewed by an advocate for that story described eating “toothpaste and Tums antacids or even salt for hunger pains.”

Missouri, meanwhile, was celebrating a new five-year, $45.7 million deal that saved the state just under $3 million a year—which works out to 38 cents a day savings for each of 23,500 prisoners, and a food budget of $1.77 per meal, before a Jefferson City Correctional Center prisoner reported going nearly two straight weeks eating bologna at every sitting. This is the pattern the new report set out to systematically examine: What are states getting for their money, and does “cheaper” mean anything other than “worse”?

Behind the New Report

Private Food, Public Harm is built on three separate lines of inquiry—a literature review of 134 vetted sources published since 2010, ten in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated people, advocates, and food service professionals, and a litigation analysis of 500 cases Aramark has faced over carceral food conditions since 2000, conducted by the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

The report can speak for itself here. On the question of nutrition, palatability, and food safety, the review’s key takeaways state:

“1. 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 DGA [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans], which emphasize eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, increasing whole grains, and limiting refined grains and sodium.

2. 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.

3. 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 the dignity of people who are already suffering the profoundly dehumanizing experience of incarceration.

4. A limited review of Aramark contracts and related documents suggests that reality is at odds with contract specifications for nutrition, food safety, and palatability … our findings raise the question whether insufficient contractual requirements and/or oversight contribute to poor outcomes for nutrition, palatability, and food safety.

5. Multiple states have projected that outsourcing carceral food service to Aramark would create significant cost savings. The sources we reviewed do not permit a comparison of the costs of contracting with Aramark relative to self-operation that accounts for tradeoffs in food quality and safety. However, 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.”

The report found alleged overpayments by correctional departments in Kentucky, Ohio, and Florida ranging from $57,193 to $5 million, and documented fines exceeding $200,000 apiece levied against Aramark by Florida, Michigan, and Ohio for contract violations including sanitation failures, employee misconduct, and food shortages.

Voices from Inside

The literature review and the court filings tell us what happened, but key stakeholder interviews tell us what it felt like to eat and serve food inside. One formerly incarcerated participant, describing what daily meals communicated about how the institution valued them, put it about as plainly as it can be put:

“We tell people what we think of them three times a day. And if you want people to leave with some sense of self intact, you can’t hand them [expletive] three times a day and expect them to leave with any kind of idea of self-dignity or self-worth.”

Another person currently incarcerated for decades, who lived through the transition to Aramark management in Florida, recalled watching the food degrade in real time:

“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 … 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.”

A former Aramark employee in a state prison kitchen, asked about a specific health hazard she’d raised internally, said: “So my concerns that I brought up, it was always a fight with Aramark. They never saw what was wrong, even with the feces in the ice machine.” An advocate summarized the accountability problem this way: “These companies, like Aramark, they get fined often for their bad practices. And then they still get their contracts renewed, which blows my mind … they get their contracts renewed with the very agency they violated and breached contract and got fined by.”

Outside contributors to the report echoed the same concerns, even from facilities Aramark doesn’t run. One participant incarcerated in North Carolina, which doesn’t currently contract with a food service provider, wrote that “the cost cutting methods these companies use to maximize profits create a dangerous trend that other carceral systems adopt to value money over health, which is unfair to those who must survive on unhealthy food and miniscule portions.”

A participant incarcerated in Florida, one of Aramark’s seventeen state contracts, wrote that since the company took over food service where he’s held, he’s seen “more sicknesses from dirty trays and utensils, and more people getting chronic diseases. The health and safety of the prison population is no longer a top priority.” And Teri Castle, who co-authored a report on West Virginia’s prison food system, which is also serviced by Aramark, described watching a salad bar and fresh produce disappear the day Aramark arrived, replaced by “for-profit food sales out of the dining room.” Fresh vegetables were sold for cash, while the free trays got worse. “If you could not afford to buy them, you did not get them,” she wrote.

The Commissary Con

That last piece of the puzzle—a private company selling you the healthy food it’s already contracted to provide with taxpayer-funded dollars—points to what may be the report’s single most damning structural finding. In some facilities, including the entire West Virginia prison system, Aramark doesn’t just run the chow hall. Through its subsidiary Union Supply Group, it also runs the commissary, and through proprietary programs like “iCare” and “Fresh Favorites,” it sells supplemental meals directly to prisoners and their families. Trinity Services Group has a similar arrangement through its sister company, Keefe Group. Two theoretically different brands represent one parent company with one incentive structure.

The report doesn’t mince words about what that incentive structure produces: “a monopoly for a private company incentivizes serving poor quality food in insufficient portions in the primary meal service to drive profits from commissary and other food-for-purchase programs. Both incarcerated people and their families and friends are at risk of financial exploitation in such a monopoly model.”

An advocate interviewed for the report explained how little-known this arrangement is even to people paying attention: “A lot of people don’t know that Trinity is owned by the same company that [Keefe] is owned by, and in fact, they sit under the same holding company, but they bid on things separately, and a lot of times their connection is not very public or known.”

This is the punishment economy’s business model operating exactly as designed. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

In Court, and Losing

If you’d guess that this much documented harm has generated a mountain of litigation, you’d be right. Aramark has been a party to somewhere between 529 and 594 cases involving carceral food since 2000, depending on which legal database you search. Few of those cases have produced change.

The litigation analysis prepared by Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems catalogs 311 to 327 cases raising Eighth Amendment cruel-and-unusual-punishment claims, up to 201 raising Fourteenth Amendment claims, up to 151 raising First Amendment claims tied mostly to religious diets, and hundreds more citing spoiled food, mold, undercooked meat, and in seventeen separate cases, maggots.

PLN’s own reporting over the years has traced dozens of these suits: a Muslim prisoner in New York denied adequate calories during a Ramadan fast;fifteen Westchester County detainees describing “salads containing rotted lettuce, vegetables with insects on them, and undercooked meat”; a Michigan prisoner hospitalized twice after Aramark kept serving him foods he was allergically documented to react to; an Indiana detainee who said he “repeatedly consumed mouse droppings” while working in a kitchen he called a “mouse zoo.” [See: PLN, May 2024, p.1.]

Almost none of these cases end with real results, and the report’s key takeaways from the litigation analysis are blunt about why:

“1. Based on the research, Aramark has been a party to between 529-594 cases regarding carceral food conditions since 2000. These cases reveal widespread allegations of nutritionally inadequate, unsafe, and contaminated food.

2. 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.

3. 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.”

The deliberate-indifference standard set by the Supreme Court in Farmer v. Brennan asks incarcerated plaintiffs to prove not just that the food was dangerous, but that named individuals knew it was dangerous and chose to serve it anyway. This bar is so high that courts have routinely dismissed claims involving rocks, staples, and human waste in food for want of a documented injury. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, also results in the dismissal of cases outright when a grievance process wasn’t “exhausted” to the letter, regardless of what was actually served on the tray.

What Real Reform
Would Require

Having documented all these harms from privatizing food service in jails and prisons, the report closes with a full set of recommendations for every actor with the power to change the system. They can serve as a checklist for legislators, sheriffs, and wardens currently administering or overseeing an Aramark contract.

The report’s overarching recommendations:

1. Meals should be safe, appealing, nutritious, and prepared and served in a way that respects the dignity of people in custody.

1A. An independent oversight entity should consult people in custody about the menu and ensure their feedback is used to guide changes. Potential methods include periodic (e.g., quarterly) surveys and focus groups, perpetual mechanisms for submitting written feedback, taste tests for potential new menu items, and reviewing grievances.

1B. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Model Food Safety Practices for Correctional Facilities should guide food safety policy and practice. At minimum, the model’s ‘standard’ practices should be required in institutional policies and food service contracts.

2. People in custody should never have to depend on commissary or other food-for-purchase venues to replace unsafe, nutritionally inadequate, or unpalatable meals.

3. 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. Calorie and nutrient needs should be primarily met through nutrient-dense foods without the need for a fortified beverage.

3A. The American Correctional Association’s current standards primarily concern nutrient adequacy. Menus should meet these standards as well as evidence-based food group (e.g., vegetables, protein foods) recommendations. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s (DGAC) ‘Eat Healthy Your Way’ Dietary Pattern for Ages 2 and Older can be used to guide meal pattern and menu development.

3B. New York City’s Food Standards are a model of such standards that are applicable to correctional facilities.

For Aramark and its competitors specifically:

1. Food service management companies should strengthen accountability for employees to comply with existing company policies and contractual requirements. Aramark has robust company policies and contractual commitments for food safety, menu adherence, and training for employees and incarcerated workers, and claims to have a third party conduct quality assurance audits at all locations at least annually. However, our research indicates those policies are not always implemented, particularly with respect to food safety, portion standardization, and staff training. Additional accountability measures could include:

1A. Publish results of third-party audits in a public accountability report annually.

1B. Establish/strengthen internal whistleblower reporting mechanisms and protections.

1C. Require supervisors to maintain photo repositories of sample meal trays for every meal served, to ensure menu fidelity.

1D. Limit food service supervisor authorization to substitute cheaper or less nutritious alternatives to menu items, especially proteins and produce.

2. Similar to the New York City Food Standards for Meals and Snacks Purchased and Served, food service management companies should adopt company-wide daily serving standards for whole fruit, total vegetables, non-starchy vegetables, whole grains, and protein foods and limits on sodium, saturated fat, and added sugar.

2A. Establish a timeline for phasing in implementation to the greatest extent possible within the constraints of each contract.

2B. Work toward negotiating prices with suppliers that make the standards accessible within clients’ typical budgets.

2C. Use the Scientific Report of the 2025 DGAC to guide the development of nutrition and food group standards for a range of calorie levels appropriate for the carceral setting.

3. Companies must prohibit the practice of adding water to foods or reducing portion sizes to stretch the number of servings in a given recipe.

4. Commissary vendors should ensure that healthy options are available to institutions and priced at or below other options in the same product category.

For policymakers and correctional institutions that hire food service management companies like Aramark:

1. We generally recommend against self-operated institutions outsourcing food service to a large food service management company. There is more evidence of negative than positive outcomes from privatization, at least with the industry leader, and it would be challenging to reverse course down the road after forfeiting in-house procurement infrastructure and staffing.

2. Policymakers and institutions should establish evidence-based food and nutrition standards for prison and jail menus based on the Scientific Report of the 2025 DGAC or a comparable authority.

3. Policymakers and institutions should allocate sufficient resources for carceral food service (whether in-house or contracted) to meet optimal nutrition, palatability, and food safety standards. Institutions should track foodborne illnesses, diet-related chronic diseases, and associated costs among the incarcerated population to facilitate evaluation of the impact of investments in food services.

4. Policymakers and institutions should implement a values-based food procurement approach that prioritizes nutritious, minimally processed foods and minimizes the use of harmful processed foods.

5. Policymakers should ensure an effective, independent oversight body has the authority to conduct unannounced inspections of institutional food service to evaluate compliance with nutrition, food safety, and palatability standards.

6. Policymakers and institutions should adjust meal times so that no more than 6 hours pass between meals during the day, and no more than 12 hours pass between dinner and breakfast. For example: breakfast 6-8 am, lunch 11 am–1 pm, dinner 5-7 pm.

7. Institutions should make additional servings of all meal components available to individuals who are still hungry after eating meals by ensuring meal production accounts for an estimated percentage of the population with greater calorie needs.

8. Policymakers and/or institutions should require healthy options to be available on commissary menus and priced at or below other options in the same product category.

9. For jurisdictions that currently outsource prison or jail food service:

9A. Contract Development and Vendor Selection

9A-i. Institutions should strengthen contract requirements as needed to require alignment with evidence-based nutrition guidelines and all regulations and best practices for food safety.

9A-ii. When developing a solicitation for a food service vendor, institutions should implement a best-value procurement approach instead of a lowest-bid approach, to prevent a vendor from winning a contract simply by offering the cheapest price. Consider foregoing a requirement that bidders have prior experience in the carceral sector to facilitate competition.

9A-iii. Policymakers and institutions should not award food service and commissary contracts to vendors owned by the same parent company (e.g., Aramark Correctional Services and Union Supply Group, Trinity Services Group and Keefe Group) to avoid creating a profit incentive to reduce food quality and quantity in the regular meal service to divert incarcerated individuals to the commissary.

9B. Contract Oversight

9B-i. An institutional employee or third party (ideally a dietitian or similarly trained professional) should conduct routine (i.e., daily), unannounced inspections of the food service operation that address menu and portion compliance, taste tests (ensuring food served is palatable and free from spoilage and contamination), and food safety. Publish results of these inspections on a regular basis.

9B-ii. Institutions should hire an in-house dietitian to develop and analyze menus or to independently review and approve the contractor’s menus, instead of relying on the contractor’s dietitian.

9B-iii. Institutions should enforce existing contract requirements with financial penalties large enough to disincentivize violations. Policymakers and institutions should not renew a contract with a vendor with repeated violations.

9B-iv. Policymakers and institutions should establish feedback loops between the incarcerated population and an independent oversight entity, who can then direct the institution and vendor accordingly and provide accountability while protecting people in custody from retaliation. This should be in place of or in addition to feedback loops between the population in custody and the vendor. Contracts should state that the vendor will face a penalty if they consistently fail to achieve satisfactory meal scores.

10. Before rebidding a food service contract, policymakers and institutions should evaluate whether projected savings from outsourcing have been achieved without compromising portion sizes, food and nutrition quality, food safety, and other outcomes such as staff adherence to security policies. If not, consider bringing food service in house to have more control over food procurement, menu development, and staffing. Another alternative could be contracting with a non-profit vendor, which may be less profit-motivated. Even smaller scale, for-profit vendors may have better quality control.

For the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare—two bodies whose accreditation is supposed to be meaningful:

1. Accrediting organizations should strengthen their nutrition standards beyond meeting the Recommended Daily Allowances to align with the 2025 DGAC’s Eat Healthy Your Way Dietary Pattern or a comparable standard.

2. Accrediting organizations should conduct unannounced inspections of food service operations and audits of menus and other supporting documents as a required component of accreditation.

For advocates:

1. Advocates should continue to publicize the harms of carceral food service to hold institutions and contractors accountable and generate support for reforms.

2. Advocates should oppose proposals to outsource food service for carceral facilities in their jurisdiction.

3. Advocates should obtain (via Freedom of Information Act request if needed) their target institution’s food service contract to understand the following: What the vendor’s obligations are and be able to demonstrate if they are not meeting them; and When the contract ends, in order to advocate for transitioning to self-operated food service or for stronger contract terms in advance of the next contract.

4. Advocates should develop a pro se explainer or provide support to people who are incarcerated seeking to hold food service providers accountable given the high evidentiary requirements for litigation.

5. Advocates should create model solicitation and contract language for carceral institutions that continue to outsource food service to hold vendors accountable for optimal nutrition, palatability, and food safety standards.

6. Advocates should develop a framework for public accountability of carceral food systems, especially when corporate actors are involved.

And for researchers:

1. Researchers should investigate whether self-operated facilities and private food service vendors beyond Aramark receive similar reports of problems with nutrition, palatability, and food safety.

2. Researchers should conduct a systematic analysis of carceral food service contracts in a sample of states and localities to shed light on the universe of contract requirements and the opportunities for improvement.

3. Researchers should study the relationship between contract requirements (and/or institutional policies) and outcomes for nutrition, palatability, and food safety.

4. Researchers should conduct a systematic analysis of carceral institution menus to compare the nutritional quality of those developed by food service management companies to those developed by self-operated institutions.

5. Researchers should use a true cost accounting approach to conduct an economic impact analysis of outsourcing carceral food service.

6. Researchers should measure and analyze food waste and associated costs in a sample of states and localities’ carceral institutions, both self-operated and privatized, to highlight environmental and fiscal impacts.

7. Researchers should assess and compare the top shareholders in Aramark and other prison industry companies to better understand who profits from the privatization of the carceral system.

That last recommendation is the question this publication has been asking about every corner of the punishment economy for years—“who profits?”—especially about the people who control meal trays.

What Comes Next

Beyond the report, CSPI and CNP also launched a letter-writing campaign and a petition calling on Aramark to meet fifteen specific demands, including publishing the results of its own third-party audits and strengthening its enforcement of the policies it already claims to have. Signatures are being collected through the summer. See: https://carceralnutrition.org/PrivateFoodPublicHarm-Action

“Correctional agencies’ decisions to outsource food service are typically driven by pressure to cut costs,” said Jessi Silverman, CSPI deputy director and a registered dietitian who led the report. “It’s unclear that privatizing food service truly cuts costs. Instead, most of the evidence indicates that it worsens quality and exacerbates harms.” Jodi Hocking, executive director of Return Strong, described the situation in Nevada’s Aramark-run prisons in terms that should stop anyone reading this cold: people there have resorted to making what she called “toilet paper tacos” (layers of toilet paper and toothpaste) “just to stave off hunger.”“The Department of Corrections must do a better job of holding Aramark accountable or return food service in-house,” she said.

Whether Aramark or the states that keep hiring it will do anything about these findings is a separate question. What’s different now is the report that captures the systematic harms of privatized food service in carceral settings. A company that has operated for decades on the assumption that nobody was looking at the whole system cannot now ignore the citable, methodologically sound documentation of exactly how its contracts work. We know better what the so-called savings actually cost us, in dollars and in dignity, and who bears that cost. This recent report won’t force Aramark’s hand, but it makes it considerably harder for anyone signing the next contract to claim they didn’t know the math.  

This article draws heavily from the report co-published with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, “Private Food, Public Harm.”

 

Daniel Rosen is a writer, justice reform ad-

vocate, and founder of the Carceral Nutrition

Project. He was incarcerated in Virginia and

Washington, D.C. from 2015 to 2021, and

lives in Washington, D.C. He previously spent

nearly twenty years in public service with the

federal government, and holds an M.A. from

Tufts University and a B.A. from UCLA.

 

Have a story you want to share about privatized food service? Contact us: info@carceralnutrition.org or visit us online at Carceral Nutrition Project

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