Rats, insects and mold: How bad food leaves prisoners hungry and sick
Rats, insects and mold: How bad food leaves prisoners hungry and sick
The food on the trays doesnât even look like food. In photos smuggled out of Georgiaâs prisons, what passes for a meal is either grossly inadequate for a grown man, unrecognizable sludge, or both.
âThere's no possible way you could survive off what they feed you,â said Bailey, who is currently incarcerated in Georgia and asked to withhold his full name for fear of retaliation from staff. He and other people behind bars in the state recount seeing rats in the kitchen and insects in the food, and being served meals on trays caked with mold. âThe level of malnourished people back here would have you torn between sick and disgusted.â
The Georgia state prison system is awash in stabbings, beatings and death, with ânear-constant, life-threatening violence functioning as the norm,â the Department of Justice . Locks donât work. Staffing is âgrossly inadequate.â But one underlying cause of the extreme danger, say advocates, prisoners and their families, is the food.
âBeing hungry all the time, and being fed slop â youâve gotta believe people get frustrated, especially over years and years of this. That frustration leads to violence,â said Bernard Christian of the grassroots advocacy group Georgia Prisoners Speak.
The problem is getting worse, according to by the group. They found that funding for food in the stateâs corrections budget is roughly flat year over year, even as prison populations rise and inflation means the same budget buys less food. Per person, Georgia spent about $1.69 a day in 2024, and has proposed to spend $1.60 a day in their 2027 budget â less than 60 cents per meal. By contrast, the Food and Drug Administrationâs ââ estimates that feeding an adult man âa nutritious, practical, cost-effective dietâ costs about $10 per day.
Travis, currently serving time in a Georgia state prison, says that people are so hungry that they steal food from the kitchen, leaving those on the chow line with even smaller portions. âYou can feel the tension in the air when stuff like this happens,â said Travis, who also asked us to use his nickname because he fears retaliation by Georgia corrections officials. Travis said he was recently diagnosed with gum disease, which his health care providers attributed to malnutrition.
Georgia spends about 14 times more on medical care than on food for the people in its prisons, a $432 million bill that Georgia Prisoners Speak describes as âwhat the State pays to treat the disease that underfeeding produces.â Certainly, one cause of sky-high medical costs is the rampant violence â hospitalizations from stabbings and beatings are costly â but poor diets can also result in high rates of chronic illness. Nationwide, people in prison have , but maladies like high blood pressure and diabetes can be caused â and worsened â by poor diet.
The Georgia corrections departmentâs food system is state-run, but for-profit prison food contractors comprise a . The biggest player, by far, is Aramark, which feeds hundreds of thousands of prisoners in seventeen states, according to . The company also services stadiums, universities and hospitals, but their correctional contracts alone were worth $1.78 billion in revenue in 2024, according to a market analysis. The report found that Aramarkâs contracts are plagued with similar problems in many of the places the company operates: unappetizing meals, inadequate portion sizes, spoiled and contaminated food. Several states have canceled contracts with Aramark because of accusations of ââ and , leading to outbreaks of foodborne illness. Even in those circumstances, the researchers found, states are paying Aramark between $3 and $7 per person per day â six to 14 times more than Georgia is spending to feed the people in its prisons.
To date, the largest prison system to have privatized its food services is the Florida Department of Corrections, which incarcerates more than 80,000 people. But it may soon lose that title.
Late on the night of May 1, hours after government offices had closed for the weekend, the federal Bureau of Prisons posted a request for information on the federal contracting site . The request read, âseeking information from qualified vendors capable of providing enterprise-wide food service operations across all Bureau of Prisons-managed institutions nationwide.â Federal prisons hold more than 140,000 people in more than 122 facilities, from Honolulu to rural New Hampshire and everywhere in between. There has never been a prison food contract that big. âNothing even close,â said Daniel Rosen, of the Carceral Nutrition Project, a nonprofit that co-authored the recent report with The Center for Science in the Public Interest and aims to increase the quality of food in U.S. prisons and jails. âIt would be a massive effort for any of these companies.â
To supplement meager meals, prisoners in Georgia and in other prison systems rely on the commissary, where money received from loved ones, or earned a few pennies at a time in prison jobs, can buy ramen, chips, and other overpriced, ultraprocessed food. And if the Bureau of Prisons follows through, those purchases will also add to some corporate bottom line: federal prison officials are looking into .
was produced by and reviewed and distributed by ±ŹÁÏTV.
