“They keep giving us potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. Elbow pasta, elbow pasta, elbow pasta.” – Male, Detention Center, Philadelphia, Dec. 2025
Two years ago, the Prison Society released Hungry and Malnourished In Prison, a groundbreaking report describing how people incarcerated in Pennsylvania’s prisons don’t get enough food to eat and how the food they receive lacks nutrition and leads to serious chronic illnesses.
But Pennsylvania isn’t alone.
Across the nation, people in prison aren’t getting enough to eat and are served food that isn’t healthy, tasty, or hygienic, according to a May 2026 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
CSPI, based in Washington, works to provide communities with evidence-based and community-informed policies on nutrition, food safety, and health across a wide spectrum of issues, from food labeling to agricultural practices to, in this case, food served to people in prison.
“Everyone deserves access to healthy and appetizing food, but this is far from reality for many of the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in the United States,” begins CSPI’s report, titled Private Food, Public Harm: Privatized Food Service in Prisons and Jails.
“While conditions vary across federal, state, and local jurisdictions and individual facilities, meals served to incarcerated people are generally poorly prepared, nutrient-poor, and unappetizing. Fresh fruits and vegetables are rare, and food safety and quality control measures are at best inconsistent.”
Outside contractors may have conflicts
CSPI’s report posits that essential conflicts of interest arise when governments hire for-profit companies to provide food for prisons and jails. The governments seek a low bid, and companies bid low to gain the contracts. The upshot? People in prisons end up with less food or less costly food so that the companies can still earn their profits.
It’s even worse, the report said, when the same for-profit company runs the prison commissary, the place where people in prison buy supplemental food and personal items, using money they’ve earned or been given by friends and family.
There’s an incentive, the report said, for the companies to encourage commissary food sales by not giving people in prison enough to eat at mealtimes. As an example, once an outside provider took over the kitchen, it stopped including fresh fruits and vegetables in meals. But trays of both could be bought, for a price, at the commissary, which the provider also ran.
In an effort to reduce the work shifts of kitchen staff, many prisons serve the last meal of the day around 4:30 or 5 p.m., leaving people without anything to eat until the next morning unless they turn to the commissary.
What the national report found also applies in Pennsylvania. In a separate Prison Society report, a man incarcerated in Philadelphia’s detention center related that he and others “save bread and apples and stuff to get us through.”
Generic canned dog food
Besides the nutritional issues, some of the food just looks and tastes bad. “Formerly recognizable turkey chunks have been replaced by a much cheaper option: an unidentifiable, ground poultry blend. This ‘meat’ is flavorless and has the texture of generic canned dog food,” Justin Slavinski, incarcerated in Florida in 2023, wrote in the report.
“It’s to the point that some of us go to sleep hungry, refusing to eat the food provided to us, and that’s not by choice,” another incarcerated person said in a survey conducted in Washington, D.C.
Too often, according to both CSPI’s report and the Prison Society’s, people receive food with rodent feces, food that is served cold, food that lacks flavor, or food that has too much salt or sugar, leading to unhealthy conditions such as diabetes and high-blood pressure. Diarrhea and vomiting from unsanitary food frequently sicken people in custody.
Sometimes people get their meals in their cells, eating their food near their toilets, and increasing the likelihood of rat and roach infestations in the same places where people sleep.
“We gotta plug our doors so they don’t come in,” said one man, interviewed in March at Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility for a Prison Society prison monitoring report.
In its report, CSPI focuses on Aramark, an $18.5 billion Philadelphia-based food and facility services company that commanded the largest share — 35 percent — of the correctional food service market in 2024.
Working in 24 percent of the United States’ 1,566 state prisons, Aramark held contracts to feed 37 percent of the 1.1 million people incarcerated in them. As of April, that amounted to food service in 17 states, including Pennsylvania, according to the report.
In Pennsylvania, Aramark develops menus, procures food, and runs food service computer systems in the commonwealth’s prisons. Kitchen staff, including managers, are state employees. Incarcerated people also work in kitchens, preparing meals.
CSPI researchers reviewed Aramark’s literature, litigation, and contracts. They also reviewed and conducted interviews with people who had been incarcerated in places where Aramark food was served. Advocacy organizations, including the Prison Society, were also consulted.
Takeaways and recommendations
While the report focuses on Aramark, it concludes with recommendations applicable to any prison and jail.
- Prisons and jails can start by using New York City’s Food Standards to create menus that are nutritionally sound and consider chronic disease prevention, prioritizing fresh and minimally processed foods. “People in custody should never have to depend on commissary or other food-for-purchase venues to replace unsafe, nutritionally inadequate or unpalatable foods,” the report said.
- Food service management companies should publish third-party audits, establish and strengthen internal whistle-blowing mechanisms and protections, and require supervisors to maintain a photo repository of sample meal trays of every meal served to ensure that menus are being followed.
- Companies that provide inadequate and unhealthy food, violating their contracts, should be financially penalized. Their contracts should not be renewed.
- There should be no more than six hours between daytime meals and 12 hours between dinner and breakfast.
- Commissaries should stock healthy food options at reduced prices.
- An outside oversight body should have the authority to conduct unannounced inspections.
- Policymakers and prison authorities should provide enough funding to ensure people in prison are adequately and nutritionally fed, and they should base their planning on the Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.
Importantly, the report says policymakers should bring food production and service in-house. “There is more evidence of negative than positive outcomes from privatization.”
Of course, as one incarcerated person interviewed for the CSPI report noted, it’s not all about contracts and nutritional guidelines. Food fuels the body, but it also feeds the psyche.
“We tell people what we think of them three times a day. And if you want people to leave with some sense of self intact, you can’t hand them [expletive] three times a day and expect them to leave with any kind of idea of self-dignity or self-worth.”
The full report, plus appendices, can be found here and a summary is available here.
