Commissary vendors, which provide the food and hygiene items sold to incarcerated people at a markup, have for years reaped the benefits as free meals in prison and jail chow halls become smaller and less edible. But it isn’t always the case that a single company controls the kitchen service, commissary sales and food packages for all prisons and jails in a given state, as Aramark Corporation does in West Virginia.
A class-action lawsuit against Aramark, the nation’s largest provider of prison and jail food services, was filed December 1 by three people currently incarcerated in West Virginia and two people in the outside community, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated. The plaintiffs, who are seeking monetary, declaratory and injunctive relief, argue that Aramark is violating the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act.
“Aramark exploits its position of exclusive control over both the mandated free daily meals services and food-for-purchase programs to perpetuate this scheme,” the lawsuit states. “By doing so, Aramark extracts a profit on both ends; it saves costs on its daily meals services business by providing less, reused and poor-quality food, while earning more money from incarcerated consumers’ purchases.”
In 2022, Aramark purchased Union Supply, one of the most widely used correctional vendors for packages of food and personal property items. Prisoners cannot order these packages themselves, but can receive them from friends and family. The items in the packages must be chosen from a pre-approved catalog and can only be ordered through the vendor website, up to a certain weight (such as 15 or 25 pounds) and frequency (such as monthly or quarterly).
Once Union Supply became a subsidiary, Aramark controlled every source of food for every person in prison, jail or juvenile detention in West Virginia. Meal portions have reportedly been shrinking for around the same time period.
Commissary is a standard feature of US prisons and jails, as is the abhorrent inflation of prices. Food packages are also common. But Aramark has gone further by capitalizing on its monopoly of a resource that’s not usually offered in prisons: fresh food.
Aramark’s version of food packages is a program called iCare, which invites families to buy “fresh” meals for their incarcerated loved ones. Plaintiff Sandra Rush, whose son is incarcerated at Mount Olive, pays more for iCare pizza and chicken wings than what she would pay “for similar items in a grocery store or even a restaurant,” but does so because there is no other choice.
Plaintiff Judy Riggs estimated spending over $4,000 on Aramark food since 2022. Her brother Hubert Riggs was incarcerated at Mount Olive for seven years before he died in July, and she continues to purchase iCare packages for a friend currently incarcerated at the same facility.
In addition to regular commissary items, people in custody in West Virginia are allowed to buy “special meals” via FreshFavorites®. According to the lawsuit, FreshFavorites® meals include “fruit-flavored yogurts, fresh vegetable trays, fried chicken, BLT sandwiches and baked potatoes, which [Aramark] has otherwise limited the availability of in its daily meals service.”
While in some US prisons people haven’t seen fresh produce in years, in others Aramark is advertising $10 veggie trays. In 2017, Prison Policy Initiative estimated that West Virginia paid incarcerated people between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour, which shouldn’t overshadow the fact that many of them don’t have access to even those jobs.
“Aramark’s scheme [has] three components,” the lawsuit argues. “(1) obtaining exclusive control over all of the food provisions available to incarcerated people by acquiring the commissary business of Union Supply, (2) maintaining an inadequate quality, quantity and variety of food in the daily meals services that it is required to provide to incarcerated people through its contract with the State, and (3) developing more food-for-purchase programs such as Fresh Favorites and iCare.”
The lawsuit alleges that Aramark directly incentivizes employees to lower the quantity and quality of food, by awarding bonuses to those who save the company money on kitchen services. Plaintiff Marcus P. McKinley, who has been incarcerated at Mount Olive Correctional Complex since 2014, alleged that kitchen workers are only being given 12 pounds of meat for recipes that call for 20 pounds.
Plaintiff Roger D. Smith, who has been incarcerated at Mount Olive since 2007, alleged seeing kitchen workers pick bugs out of gravy before serving it, as well as seeing people housed in segregation or the mental health units be served days-old reused food that was not on the menus for general population. Plaintiff William R. Johnson alleged that he once heard “an Aramark worker state that he would cut the ingredients for daily meals services as much as possible in order to get a bonus.” Johnson was incarcerated at Mount Olive from 2009 until November, when he was transferred to a different facility on the other side of the state.
West Virginia is paying Aramark to serve the items on its menus, which for example advertise 100-percent beef and whole-muscle breaded fish patties. People in custody at Mount Olive report that what they actually served are meat “pellets.”
Previous lawsuits against Aramark have described the food as rotten, expired, reused, undercooked, uncooked, infested with maggots, infested with rodent, insect or bird droppings, or made with unauthorized substitutions. Aramark reported $17.4 billion in revenue for 2024.
“[F]amilies with loved ones in prison cannot afford to keep sending money to Aramark, a huge national corporation, simply to make sure their loved ones have enough to eat,” stated Lydia Milnes, deputy director of nonprofit legal services group Mountain State Justice, “especially when Aramark is already receiving millions from the State of West Virginia to feed those same people.”
According to Prison Legal News, all kitchen service in West Virginia prisons was once carried out by people in custody, who would utilize fresh produce grown in facility gardens and greenhouses.
“Food is a uniquely powerful tool to exploit,” the lawsuit states. “Aramark knows this.”
Images (cropped) via United States District Court Southern District of West Virginia
