Prisoners being ripped off by Aramark, class action lawsuit charges
There's little public sympathy for prison inmates but everyone has to eat
It’s common for private contractors to rake in big profits at the expense of inmates
A lawsuit says Aramark starves prisoners, forcing them to buy additional food from its commissaries
The company’s contract with W. Virginia requires it to provide adequate nutrition
Prison inmates are the original captive consumers. They can’t go across the street for a sandwich or order out for a pizza, so they’re left pretty much with whatever the prison wants to feed them.
Public agencies are notoriously bureaucratic and tight with a dime, so the food that inmates get from them is nothing to write home about. But when the prison has outsourced its food services — as many have — things get worse more quickly.
In one case that never came to public attention, inmates at a Virginia lock-up that housed prisoners from D.C., got the three daily meals they were entitled to but they were jammed into an eight-hour period, allowing the contractor to operate the kitchen with a single shift.
The dietician who had a contract to oversee the food service told me that each of the three daily meals was often a bologna sandwich — one slice of bologna on white bread.
Eating three light meals in eight hours might sound all right but for anyone with health issues, most notably diabetes, it can cause serious health issues. Sixteen hours is a long time to go without food.
Now a lawsuit charges that inmates in West Virginia face a similar predicament.
“Soaring food prices and utility bills are already straining West Virginian’s budgets; families 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, especially when Aramark is already receiving millions from the State of West Virginia to feed those same people,” said Lydia Milnes, the Deputy Director of Mountain State Justice, one of the legal organizations bringing the action.
Prison profiteering
Ripping off incarcerated people and their families is a longstanding tradition in America and it doesn’t just involve food. Telephone calls and internet access are notoriously expensive and physical therapy often consists of little more than sitting on a bench for a few minutes.
So the class action lawsuit filed this week against Aramark Corporation’s correctional services may not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the system.
In the suit, incarcerated people and their families allege that Aramark drives them to purchase food from its food-for-purchase programs, such as commissary, Fresh Favorites, and iCare, by failing to provide them with adequate mandatory daily meals.
“Food is a uniquely powerful tool, and Aramark is using it to exploit a captive consumer market of incarcerated people and their families to unlawfully profit off them,” said Shennan Kavanagh, director of litigation at the National Consumer Law Center. “Aramark’s misconduct has been widely publicized, and it is time for it to treat all of its consumers fairly, including incarcerated people and their families.”
The complaint alleges that Aramark’s scheme violates the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act and related laws and charges that Aramark has engaged in a scheme to extort profits from incarcerated consumers and their loved ones by failing to provide inmates with adequate daily meals services, thus driving them to purchase food from Aramark-owned vendors.
A lock on the market
Aramark has exclusive control over all food provision in West Virginia’s correctional facilities, including at Mt. Olive Correctional Complex in Fayette County, where the incarcerated plaintiffs are detained.
The suit notes that incarcerated consumers are a captive market and have no choices for obtaining or purchasing food other than through Aramark. They are not allowed to receive food directly from family members or other loved ones, who must also purchase care packages through Aramark. While Aramark has a contract with West Virginia that mandates specific standards for its free daily meals services in prisons including Mt. Olive, it grossly fails to meet those or even its own purported business standards, the suit alleges.
Milnes said the complaint shines a light on a concerning cycle of abuse that forces incarcerated consumers at Mt. Olive to buy food from Aramark with money that they could use for other purposes, such as communicating with family, purchasing over-the-counter medications, or saving for reentry.
Family members, already burdened by lost income due to their loved one’s incarceration, often sacrifice their own wellbeing to purchase food packages from Aramark to supplement Aramark’s inadequate daily food services, she said.
The complaint alleges that Aramark exploits its exclusive control over both the mandated free daily meals services and food-for-purchase programs to perpetuate this scheme; by limiting the quality, quantity, and variety of daily meal services, Aramark drives incarcerated consumers to purchase food from its food-for-purchase programs.
The complaint alleges that Aramark regularly fails to provide sufficient ingredients for its own recipes, including providing grossly insufficient (and at times no) amounts of meat, dairy, and vegetables required for the recipes. Additional accounts of misconduct throughout West Virginia mirror a nationwide problem, as Aramark Corporation has been repeatedly accused of severe health and safety violations, sanitation violations, unauthorized food substitutions, undercooked food, and food shortages where it has done business in correctional facilities across the country.
Plaintiffs are seeking monetary, declaratory, and injunctive relief on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated to stop Aramark’s illegal conduct.