A major new report released in 2026 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and the Carceral Nutrition Project is shining a hard light on what incarcerated people across the United States are actually being fed — and the picture is deeply troubling.
The report, titled Private Food, Public Harm: Privatized Food Service in Prisons and Jails, documents how private food service contractors — Aramark chief among them — are consistently failing the people in their care.
Who is Aramark? They are an $18.5 billion Philadelphia-based corporation that controls approximately 35 percent of the correctional food service market in the United States and holds contracts to feed roughly 37 percent of the 1.1 million people incarcerated in state prisons. That is an enormous amount of power over the lives of real human beings.
The findings of the report are disturbing:
- Incarcerated people routinely report receiving undercooked, moldy, and rotten food
- Meals contaminated with maggots have been documented
- Portions are inadequate — people are being sent away from meals still hungry
- More than 500 lawsuits have been filed against Aramark since 2000 for nutritionally inadequate and unsafe food
- Aramark employees have been incentivized with bonuses to cut kitchen costs — directly impacting the quality and quantity of food served
A class action lawsuit filed by prisoners in West Virginia alleges that Aramark deliberately serves inedible food in order to push incarcerated people toward purchasing food from the commissary — a commissary that Aramark also controls through its subsidiary, Union Supply Group. Profiting twice: once from cutting the food budget, and again from the forced purchases that follow.
In July 2026, UNITE HERE Local 11 filed suit against the Arizona prison system for refusing to release information about Aramark’s performance as the state’s food contractor. Accountability is being resisted at every level.
And just this past June, CSPI and the Carceral Nutrition Project formally urged the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons not to privatize federal prison food service — citing exactly these kinds of documented failures.
These are not statistics. These are people — fathers, sons, daughters, mothers — who are hungry, who are sick, who are eating food that you would not feed to an animal. The law says that depriving a person of adequate food is cruel and unusual punishment. But when a corporation profits from doing exactly that, enforcement is slow and justice is elusive.
Prison ministry means we do not forget these people. We do not pretend the walls make them invisible. God sees them. We must too.