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Meals service firm Aramark is leaving incarcerated individuals in West Virginia with empty stomachs and their family members with empty pockets, a federal class-action lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal district courtroom in West Virginia, claims that Aramark is exploiting incarcerated individuals at Mount Olive Correctional Complicated by denying them sufficient meals — as a substitute pushing them and their households to spend cash on meals objects and care packages they have to additionally buy from the identical firm.
Marcus P. McKinley mentioned in a courtroom submitting that he has seen the standard of the meals decline throughout his practically 12 years in Mount Olive — being served leftovers and turkey “pellets” instead of contemporary meat — in addition to the amount. He spends practically all his $70 month-to-month revenue on commissary objects to complement the small meals parts. One other plaintiff, Judy Riggs, mentioned she spent over $4,000 to purchase meals from Aramark’s food-for-purchase packages for her incarcerated family members since 2022.
“Meals is a uniquely highly effective instrument, and Aramark is utilizing it to use a captive shopper market of incarcerated individuals and their households to unlawfully revenue off them,” Shennan Kavanagh, director of litigation on the Nationwide Shopper Regulation Middle, mentioned in a press launch.
The lawsuit alleges that this scheme unfairly targets incarcerated individuals in a bid to drive income for Aramark, which generated $18.5 billion in fiscal 12 months 2025.
Aramark has unique management over all meals in West Virginia’s correctional amenities, and is the biggest meals companies supplier for prisons and jails in the US, in keeping with the lawsuit. As of Dec. 1, Aramark’s portfolio consists of 16 state departments of corrections. Final 12 months, the corporate reported serving roughly 450 correctional amenities.
For Teri Fortress, the shift to Aramark in 2019 was noticeable. She was incarcerated and dealing within the kitchen at West Virginia’s Lakin Correctional Middle. She watched because the contemporary produce grown to inventory the salad bar disappeared. Hamburger patties had been changed with processed substitutes and actual eggs with processed ones.
The shift grew to become noticeable in her well being, too. She had little power and her abdomen simply “wasn’t working proper.” She struggled with power constipation, hypertension and hemorrhoids so unhealthy that she in the end wanted surgical procedure.
“They’re extra desirous about earning money and saving cash than they’re within the well being of the individuals consuming that meals,” Fortress mentioned.
The brand new authorized problem is predicated on shopper safety legal guidelines supposed to stop unfair, misleading or abusive practices. On the federal degree, the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau has historically been tasked with implementing these legal guidelines, whereas states even have their very own shopper safety statutes and enforcement mechanisms.
The lawsuit alleges that Aramark is in violation of the West Virginia Shopper Credit score and Safety Act as a result of it’s unfair to individuals who — as a result of their incarceration limits what they will purchase and the place they will purchase it from — haven’t any different, much less exploitative choices to feed themselves.
The Nationwide Shopper Regulation Middle, an financial justice advocacy group concerned within the lawsuit, final 12 months deemed incarcerated individuals notably weak to monetary exploitation due to their restricted monetary assets, low schooling ranges and excessive charges of psychological sickness.
“The aim right here actually is simply to require that corporations observe the identical legal guidelines with respect to incarcerated those that they need to observe with everyone else. That they are not allowed to use individuals as a result of they’re incarcerated,” mentioned Rebecca Livengood, a lawyer representing the incarcerated individuals and their households on this lawsuit.
Aramark didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Jail meals is notoriously unhealthy, and Aramark has been the topic of many food-related horror tales. These stories embrace meals contaminated with mouse droppings, maggots, desserts nibbled on by rats, spoiled hen and “mass poisonings.”
The brand new lawsuit, although, focuses on the dearth of meals out there to incarcerated individuals every day. This drawback is just not new, neither is it confined to West Virginia. In Nevada, incarcerated individuals reported consuming toothpaste, antacids, salt and bathroom paper to ease starvation pangs.
Meals insecurity in jail can have lasting results, each bodily and mentally, mentioned Leslie Soble, creator of the newly launched ebook “Consuming Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Meals in Jail.”
“You get sentenced to 5 years in jail, or regardless of the sentence is. You don’t get sentenced to 5 years in jail and lifelong diabetes. However that’s the sort of factor that’s really occurring to individuals,” Soble mentioned. “That in itself is a type of prolonged punishment.”
The allegations within the lawsuit got here as no shock to Soble, whose analysis included surveying previously incarcerated individuals and visiting jail kitchens. This analysis, compiled in a 2020 report, discovered lots of the similar horror tales, together with spoiled meals and skimpy parts.
Consultants say meals is only one sector of a bigger jail companies business that siphons wealth from among the nation’s poorest communities. Relations of incarcerated individuals have reported going into debt from the prices of cellphone calls and visits, or working a number of jobs to afford them.
Incarcerated individuals and their households additionally purchase toiletries and fundamental hygiene merchandise, followers within the sweltering warmth of the summer time, snacks from the commissary, medical care and clothes. These merchandise are usually overpriced, regardless of abysmal wages for jail labor. Incarcerated employees usually earn lower than $1 per hour, if they’re paid in any respect.
“It is a actually captive market,” Livengood mentioned. “It is a group of people that haven’t any means to buy something apart from what they’re allowed to buy. And in so lots of these aspects of life, meals, clothes, video, visits, emails … A lot of these have now been farmed out to corporations who anticipate to revenue from them.”
In the meantime, the big corporations that dominate jail companies herald billions in income — practically as a lot as governments pay to function personal prisons. And the correctional amenities they do enterprise with usually profit as effectively, within the type of website commissions, a share of the gross sales income.
There’s little regulation of those dominant corporations that monopolize “jail retail,” wrote Stephen Raher, an lawyer who beforehand served as normal counsel of the Jail Coverage Initiative. As an alternative, protections for incarcerated customers stay “scattered and sometimes illusory.”
“Time and time once more, issues about abusive monopolist enterprise practices are dismissed by policymakers who declare that correctional businesses take these issues into consideration when awarding unique vendor contracts,” Somewhat wrote.
In recent times, the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau has delivered some victories for incarcerated individuals.
In 2021, the CFPB fined JPay, a monetary companies firm, for charging individuals newly launched from jail unfair charges to entry their very own cash on pay as you go debit playing cards they had been required to make use of.
And in 2024, the CFPB ordered International Tel Hyperlink to return $3 million to its customers. The Bureau discovered that the corporate engaged in unfair practices by blocking customers’ accounts and stopping family and friends from sending funds by way of debit or bank card switch.
Nonetheless, related reduction could also be tougher to return by, because the Trump administration strikes to dismantle the company. Final month, the Justice Division declared the company’s funding mechanism illegal, which might depart it with out a price range subsequent 12 months. And this week, a prime official on the company resigned, citing his frustration with the dearth of a path for the company to implement the legislation.
